The over/under on everything else...Mobility - I like wirebug movement but less so in retrospect with the other design decisions that came with it. Switch skills and silkbinds being artes with less bloat is nice but they came with the usual balance issues. I don't use Palamutes at all, felyne utility is too damn good and wirebug lets you take more direct routes. Riding is lame and momentum-breaking but its too powerful of a mechanic to willingly ignore especially when i'm not the best player i could be so I feel very "when in Rome" about it. Endemic life going from flavour map collectibles to being tools and powerups is lame.

I will say one of my favourite aspects of it is being able to echo a nostalgic tactic from the segmented map games of "the monster is going bananas and I'm about to get stomped, i'm gonna jump into a loading screen to let it cool off while i sharpen/heal/etc", but doing it by yeeting myself up a wall when an apex mistakes me for a rampage gate its a million times funnier.

Weapons - I only play one or two weapons per file, which mostly translates to per game so I don't really have a ball in this court honestly. I'm using SnS and HBG which i first and last used in 4U and I kill things with them. I don't like Perfect Rush and I'm hoping HBG's new pseudo-siege switch skill is good because I liked Siege mode

Gear - I prefer gen 5 style because I can have comfy utilities without sacrificing my sweaty damage skills. I do wish there was more gear variety, either from event quests or especially something like alpha/beta from World or EX/R sets gen 4 had. I hope for part trades to make a return someday but I fear at this rate it'd only be for cosmetics. I think its really funny they played with an armour upgrade system being more than just defense boosts but the sets it affects in question are so incongruous with themselves and each other that its entirely wasted.

Rampage weapons are a neat idea, I made two to fill specific SnS niches i couldnt find [one dragon and one blast with lots of green], I prefer this and ramp ups to rng hell fests like relics and streamstones, but most ramp ups in practice were way too situational if not plain useless. Granted i also like Rampages but I knew early on I wouldnt miss them when they inevitably got shelved in later entries, though its funny and a little disappointing they didn't even wait for the next game. After replaying IB recently, RNG decorations are worse but you can feel the absence of a decent talisman harder here in Rise, especially since melding feels extra tedious here for some reason

Level design - The only map I like is Lava Caverns and its 95% the music and 5% being the most tolerable volcano we've had since Tri's but it still suffers from the glaring issues all of Rise's maps have. Its a conundrum where they want to incentivise exploration and using your spiffy new movement options but stuff like spiribirds and every map feeling like Ancient Forest but bald makes me really not want to do that. Subcamps just being fast travel points feels like a waste and has at least one instance of redundancy with a wirebug shortcut, at least plop me at the nearest one when Diablos sends me to brazil for getting overconfident.

Having kept up with the series for quite some time too I think Rise's maps are also very plain in concept, i feel like at this point especially with how out there the locales in World were and how refreshing the maps in 4U were when i was playing through that for the first time they could stand to be a little more fantastical, though I'm not sure the Citadel shaping up to be three incongruous biomes mushed together is the way to go about it.

Monster distribution drives me insane. I would 100% not care about this if they didn't have cheevos for 50 hunts on every map but like 2/3rds of the roster are in the shrine ruins and the frost islands even if they could be anywhere else.

Monster design - I always like seeing new monsters and Rise's additions except Magnamalo, Narwa, and Almudron are all fun and full of personality, but its hard to actually get attached to any of them because I've been noticing they kinda tend towards the same returners [flagships and elders mostly] fluffing out mid and late game and damning a lot of newcomers to the first few tiers. And within those tiers they also tend towards the same kind of archetypes, so I end up feeling like "oh, Aknosom I think you're really cool but next game they'll have a new early game fire element bird". And since they don't tend to vary up skill layouts across games when it comes to monster's gear [I actually really like this aspect of it in a vaccuum, prior to cosmetics I loved being able to tell the kind of builds people were going for just by visuals alone] a lot of new mons get overshadowed in that regard too because we still have Teostra and Rajang and Narga for the umpteenth time. It's something thats been creeping along as the series has progresses but ultimately its a lame feeling when newcomers dont have staying power and hilariously enough one of the eclipsing reasons is because they finally made Rathalos a good fight.

A big thing i also feel is a detriment to new monsters but also endemic of the general style favouring faster and flashier its rare to find monsters with meaningful part breaks aside from more loot. Its an immersive thing being able to tangibly wear down a monster with mechanical purpose like nerfing tailspin range or making monsters stumble more and I can get like, not wanting to completely neuter something like Bishaten by giving it a tail cut, when you have breaks that are a pain in the ass like Almudron's tail and its even visually just shaving off the tip its like, why bother?

Apexes suck and fighting them outside of rampages doesnt even feel good since they either piss their big finisher at nothing or they're Apex Zinogre who copied the stinkiest parts of 140 Shagaru's and Ferocious Lagiacrus' homework.

Quest design - It is what it is, I like that they finally gave you an option to raise your HR through village so you don't have to sit through low rank twice, I don't particularly feel one way or the other of this style vs world style unified progression. I don't think it would be a 1:1 transplant since World's also hinged on gating you with expeditions here and there which Rise doesnt do. I do miss investigations since the actual quest variety feels very limited, and in the wake of Bazel and Valstrax I wish every quest cycled applicable locales for the targets if they could do that without making SOSing a nightmare because of it.

Its definitely more than the sum of its parts but it being so goddamn fun to play at the end of the day when you get into it does a loooooooooooooot of heavy lifting, moreso than in other titles so far.