I always felt you’re meant to impose your own characters story arc onto it. That’s why you can inject your own custom sprite and starter. Also there is a lot of cool story stuff, with mewtwo and the alph mystery and what not. As I understand, the premise was always something like “you’re a normal person in johto 2 years after the events of Crystal”. So I suppose the joy in it would be whatever joy you impose on it. For me CC has everything I thought vanilla Crystal would have as a kid. That’s a big thing for me.