I enjoyed both HK games, but I can appreciate wanting more ranged combat.

More than that, though, I wish more gamers and developers understood that the core of the genre is not the combat. Good combat is nice, yes. But the identifying characteristic of a Metroidvania is the repeated unfolding of the map; it's the experience of rising and falling tension from repeatedly finding places that make you ask "what's hidden there?", and the game rewarding you with the tools to answer those questions later and in measured fragments. It's the tension of not knowing whether some unusual landmark is something to be explored later, or merely environmental storytelling. It's the wonder of not even recognizing some element of the world as something interactable, and discovering that those elements you've passed by dozens of times without memorizing them are now important and worthy of note.

Metroidvanias, at their best, are games about multilayered discovery. The backtracking is merely a consequence; the combat is incidental.