Yeah, I don't mean to say the 3rd game doesn't have its advantages (hardcore mode being the biggest one), but it sucks that the forward steps came at the expense of other stuff. Whether or not San Van or Port Carverton is better is subjective I guess, but I definitely feel like San Van was heaps better. Finally being able to create parks was cool until the insanely shitty framerate showed up. And then while they definitely fixed all the annoying shit about the menus in previous games, they also decided to go and made the bails complete shit for a gimmicky feature.
It only really frustrates me because we probably won't see a fourth game, and so we're stuck with the third one which is clearly a little rough around the edges because it had the least amount of development time put into it.