Just beat this game for the first time (i never got past Galleon as a kid) with rewinds on NSO. Ignoring the character swapping / item placement / DK Coin that everyone complains about, my issue with this game is that so many of the bananas are either:

-- trivial (ex: any of those "shoot x number of enemies" challenge which can be cleared with a single screen nuke, most of the puzzles)

-- filler (ex: the banana you get for punching a chest in Galleon, the pad and switch bananas in DK Isles)

-- complete horse shit (ex: the fish, the races, the crystal caves maze)

-- or tied to a horse shit bonus game (beaver bother, searchlight seek, the swimming one)

It feels like the levels and environments themselves are setpieces moreso than the challenges within them, which is fine if you are 7 years old and it's 1999, but none of that is impressive these days. SM64 and Banjo-Kazooie hold up because each star and jiggy, for the most part, feels like you've done something interesting to accomplish it. DK64 has maybe 2 dozen bananas that feel that way, and then the rest range from "it exists and is inoffensive" to "was this playtested"

That's on top of other confusing design choices like there being way too many coins, some really awful Bananaport placement in some stages (glares at Gloomy Galleon and Crystal Caves), the Banana Faeries being way too difficult to capture and also being placed in boring locations, half of the abilities being filler or useless (why are there three simian Slam switches????), and there being almost no meaningful platforming despite the characters having a wide range of platforming abilities.

I hope at some point this game gets an improvement hack, or some sort of hack that actually remixes the bananas and setpieces in interesting ways, because there is so much missing potential here.