First of all, let me explain that when a new version of a game comes out, I expect it to improve upon the problems of the original version.
A lot of the new scenes fall into one of the two problems
1. There are "humorous" scenes that opt to take a singular somewhat subdued aspect of a character and exaggerate it to the Nth degree. Chie's meat kung-fu schtick goes up tenfold as does Kanji's "prove I'm a man" and Yosuke's "LOL this is so gay right? I'm not gay". It's something that was hardly subtle in the previous version but instead of fixing that they just doubled down harder on it.
2. It's a scene with Marie in it so the focus falls on her. Now I understand that a brand new character needs lots of scenes in order for her to established. The problem is there's already an entire investigation crew that could use some tweaking, specifically Naoto who comes in far too late into the game to really be fully realized and suffers from the same issue Haru did of feeling a bit too buddy buddy with everyone this late in. With problems like this in the game, I don't see why they would add ANOTHER character into the mix. It just means that they won't be able to spend time fixing any of the previous character problems in service of this new character who they have to work with from the ground up.
It also doesn't help that Marie has a shitty personality.
Now if these scenes were all optional that would be fine, but a good chunk of them aren't. As a result we now have the problems of the first game along with the new problems from the new scenes. This also somewhat applies to the Adachi social link however that is completely optional. This is the issue with "expanding" upon backstory's, after a period of time people tend to fill in the gaps on their own. Worst case scenario the official information completely contradicts what people have filled in and best case scenario is aligns right up. In Adachi's case there's nothing meaningful about his social link that I wasn't able to infer on my own so while nothing about it feels super out of place, it ends up feeling like a waste of time that only has the purpose of setting up an extremely out of character optional ending. Keyword is optional though so I don't consider any of this a huge offense. I just don't consider it an upgrade when it doesn't add anything or fix any problems I had.
What IS an offense is making his social link of the "Jester" arcana. This has probably got to be the DUMBEST decision made and I can't understand how nobody in the board meeting said "Wait what? No don't do that". It immediately clues you in that Adachi's place in the plot is way more than meets the eye and considering said plot is a "who dunnit?" this practically a spoiler. I'm not saying Adachi's place was super subtle in the previous game but is just doubling down on it and is basically one step away from drawing "I AM THE CULPRIT" on his forehead. To be honest if I was trying to make this post shorter I'd say this was the sole reason not to play Golden as your first time. It's an unnecessary streamlining of a murder mystery that could've benefited from not being so simple already.
I agree that the way inheritance works is better. It is a shame however that skill cards proceeds to dump all over that by letting you add any skill to any Persona you want regardless of inheritance. It takes a mechanic that was always designed to make Persona's unique and not just interchangeable monsters and turns them into interchangeable monsters. If the resources were limited I might be able to accept this but they aren't and are actually quite easy to obtain. This is optional though so I won't consider it a downgrade, just not an upgrade.
That new dungeon is definitely an upgrade though. It features lots of unique attributes that were sorely missing from the original game and is reminiscent of an old style RPG dungeon. It is a shame that it is locked behind Marie but it's good to be there.
I'll also briefly touch up on the inclusion of super ultimate Personas. They sure look neat sometimesish but I genuinely don't feel Persona 4 needed anything to make it easier, it was doing that pretty fine on its own. Naoto though ended up being a complete overcorrection. They took a party member whose skills were mostly useless and gave her the ability to do pretty much everything. I really do appreciate them going through the effort of trying to fix her this game, I just don't think it worked out well at all and instead of giving me more interesting options to form a party around, it just kinda turned Naoto into my new Yosuke IE the person who never leaves the party. Valiant effort though.
tl;dr: I think the worst way to improve upon something is to take something, and add a bunch of new stuff to it in hopes that it'll be good enough to offset the bad stuff that was there before. This is P4G's philosophy in terms of improvements and unfortunately it's also combined with doubling down certain bad aspects from before. I need to reiterate: A lot of what I mentioned are problems that I either had in the previous game that haven't been addressed or are problems I didn't have at all (like everything with Marie) and now exist.
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