The game's not awful, it's just broken. The ridiculous quantity and length of load screens was obviously avoidable. Levels try a lot of things that work fine most of the time, but suffer hilarious bugs for no sane reason. There were surely unaddressed playtester notes about how annoying certain bosses were - both for gameplay, and for repetitive audio barks.

I dunno that it needs a full from-scratch remaster, but it could definitely stand some professional updates. Or drop the assets into a new engine so it can take fresh shaders and feel like it's copying Mario Odyssey instead of Mario Sunshine.