Actually I have a few reasons as to why I probably feel this way.
One of them being that I enjoyed the battle system, sure it wasn't boots, hammers and FP but the stickers work in a similar way. Boot sticker is boot, Hammer sticker is hammer, FP is just rarer stickers. Though the biggest complaint isn't the battle system, it was not being necessary to fight everything.
I fought everything. I see it, I kill it, I get more stickers/coins, then I can re-buy thing stickers later for puzzles. I think that may have been the intended way to play since it all worked out very neatly, I wouldn't run out of stickers because they were abundant so I didn't feel limited in what I could do during a battle. I also didn't get puzzled by the puzzles for too long. Most were fairly obvious, some were a little more difficult but not absolutely impossible.
Then finally I'm not someone who went into it thinking I would get a similar experience to TTYD. At the time TTYD was my favourite game, so I had the mindset of 'why would I want another TTYD? I already have TTYD, nothing can replace it and they likely won't surpass it' so I just saw it as a fresh new experience. It wasn't like the old games really related back to each other much anyway.
Can't say I care for the plot in a Paper Mario game.
