Sonic Superstars is desperate to control the player's sense of fulfillment. It wants you to see everything it has so, so bad. It won't let you get all emeralds before it would be convenient for it, lest you ignore all the challenge they built just for you; it doesn't let you kill bosses before you see all of its attacks and patterns. It won't let you go by without knowing when a specific ability would've been useful, and most abilities aren't useful at all beyond that. It hates the idea of losing control over the player and their interactions with the action space so much it's willing to contradict the rules it established before just to prevent you from not doing what it wanted you to, when it wanted you to.

Classic Sonic is not just pinball physics. There's a sense of transgression in early Sonic games -- in pulling off what the game didn't seem to want you to do -- that is completely missing here.