They wanted this to be a separate game soooooooo bad. Getting rid of every aspect of Rise's core identity kind of sucks (namely the poems and the vocals in the music, as well as the rampage quests, monsters, and weapons, the former of which I kind of liked, the middle of which would have been fantastic in G-rank outside of anomaly quests (which suck so bad and are essentially padding for the postgame) and the latter of which I loved) and moving from the friendly people of Kamura to everyone mostly acting cold except Bahari was jarring. They also completely fucked Shagaru Magala, one of my favorite fights of 4th gen, by making it 1) not an arena fight like it was meant to be and thus making a majority of its attacks feel much worse to play against as well as making it feel less eventful, and 2) have a more generic moveset (not every elder dragon needs a laser beam). And I'm sure the new silkbind attacks for other weapons are fun but as a hammer player the new silkbind attacks basically just being "have more dps" was pretty boring. Still pretty fun overall since it's a monster hunter game though.