Catan just feels weird. The thing is - and I kinda validated that recently by watching highlevel competetive play of the catan base game, but: You only have like 2-4 meaningful decisions in a game. The rest is just follow through and dice.

And these things aren't that hard to see at a decent level. And when you make these decent decisions, you mostly just win. Even with the robber, there's limited counterplay to these good initial choices. This makes it hard to play casually as well once you know the good things.