Feel the same way about a lot of these points, but to a much lesser degree. The experience of playing the first game kinda exemplifies my attitude towards this: the segmented, acre-by-acre camera in that game is by far my favorite, for instance. But I'll always prefer the modern camera setup going forward, not because it's "better," but because it's more convenient and accessible, and I've already had that initinal experimental experience already.
And this is kind of how I feel about everything in regards to that first game. It was so new and mysterious and it felt like you could still hypothetically run into something you'd never seen before even after 100 hours of the same repetitive daily cycle. But I don't think you can really recapture that magic anymore. The games have been great since then but that same initial feeling of discovery never quite came back.
Like city folk kind of did nothing for me despite having a lot of the stuff that makes AC good, because it had no ambition beyond that. So imo all you can really do is expand options, impart more player agency, and smooth out gameplay wrinkles, even if you start to erode aspects that initially made the series so special. The aesthetic experience of playing an animal crossing game is so strong, afterall, that I feel like it can carry a title no matter how far we stray.
By no means is this always the answer--intentional incovenience is a massive part of game design--but animal crossing's approach to streamlining has always been very sensible in the past so I'm willing to give NH the benefit of the doubt in the same way I did for the mayor stuff in NL, which mostly payed off for me.
One thing I will say I 100% regret losing is this sense of immersing yourself into a new community though. By making you the mayor, or in this case the effective diety of an island cult, the power dynamic between you and the villagers is way off. I guess this is kind of impossible to rectify with the addition of more player agency, unfortunately
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