What exactly makes Sonic Origins so unpalatable?

[SolidSurgeTT]

I definitely have issues with the game but they're more isolated to specific pieces of hardware (those without accelerated graphics). Just as a game by itself...seems relatively inoffensive.

Honestly I take Sonic Stadium's side on the matter: it's mostly competent. Just wish they didn't use the Hedgehog Engine to make the freaking menus.

[Indigo Rush]

It's exactly what it advertised itself to be, yet the standard we hold for these games demands more. It is, by all technicality, the "definitive" retail version of these games. That does not mean that it's polished or glitch-free.

It bears the unenviable task of replacing the beloved MJ tracks in Sonic 3. The retro engine has enough differences that the audience that demanded this compilation most are let down. It does not include emulations of the original games to placate this. It does not include CRT dithering shaders, ensuring that these games will not look as intended in any official capacity.

It launched with fewer bonuses than Mega Collection, a compilation that existed two decades prior. Not all characters are playable in all games out of the box, apart from a years later paid update. There's no option to play with the life system outside of a half-baked Classic Mode. It could've been so much more.

Yet it's hard to be that mad about it. They play about as well as they should. They include new animated cutscenes. DLC will include Amy and all Game Gear games. Sonic 3&K is finally remastered, something we've wanted for over a decade now. These remasters are no longer shackled to smartphones. 

It evens itself out. It could've been better, historically these have been worse, so it's just hard to feel anything other than "alright, it's here."

[Blue Blood]

Bloated menus are the least of Origins' problems. Sonic Team hurriedly and sloppily bundled all the the Retro Engine remakes into their custom Hedgehog Engine shell and made a mess of things. Headcannon was fortunately contracted to build S3K from scratch so it manages to stand above the other games in the collection (music aside), but SEGA still managed to wipe their arses with it before selling it to fans.

Here's a brief rundown of assorted issues in Origins:

1. Classic mode isn't the original experience (i.e. It's not emulated roms so it comes with all the changes of the Retro Engine). 
2. Removing lives was a good idea, but it ought to be an option in anniversary mode rather than mandatory. 
3. The pixles in the games are stretched and not sharp. I've no idea why this is. Maybe the games are running at a lower resolution and being blurred as they're stretched or maybe a filter is being applied. Either way, it makes everything look a little bit worse than it should. Mania already offered control over filters. 
4. The new animations from Powerhouse are excellent, but they play even in Classic mode and contextually shouldn't always exist. For example, the same animation plays at the end of both Sonic and Knuckles' stories for S3K. But said animation depicts Eggman floating in the ocean after his defeat at Doomsday Zone. That has nothing to do with Knuckles' Story and actually takes place before it. 
5. The animations are incorrectly scaled on Switch when viewing then from the gallery. 
6. The Drop Dash in S1, S2 and CD was programmed by Sonic Team, and it's somewhat broken. It doesn't function properly on slopes. Rather than working like in Mania and S3K (where it was not programmed by Sonic Team), it makes Sonic crouch and do a mini spin dash. And even though its since been patched out, we can't forget that the Drop Dash prevented Tails from respawning in S2. 
7. On mobile, S1 and S2 had remastered soundtracks and SCD had restored extended versions of the tracks with new looping points. They have been dropped in Origins. 
8. The music in S3K is played at a lower bitrate than the other games, making it sound muffled. 
9. The replaced tracks in S3K have not been recreated or finished. They have been pulled directly from a prototype and sound bad. This is what Carnival Night 1 sounds like and this is what Carnival Night 1 is supposed to sound like. 
10. Jun Senoue created this Sonic 4 abomination. Yes, S3K lacked a unique Super theme so it wad nice to see one made. But absolutely no effort was made for it to actually sound like the rest of the music in the game. It uses all the same instruments as S4, including a low-quality sample of the S1/2 snare drum. It didn't take long for fans to fix it. 
11. Bugs in the mobile Retro Engine games (such as with the SCD timer) were not fixed when Sonic Team slapped then into Origins. 
12. Character hit boxes are off in all of the games, making crushing deaths very common in levels like Chemical Plant and Carnival Night. Sometimes characters even collide with objects that they didn't before, like certain ceiling spikes in Metropolis. Small inaccuracies like these have been documented for years and by all rights should have been fixed by now. 
13. Features from the mobile releases, such as multiple save files and a proper character select screen, where torn out and replaced with a single ugly menu that overlays the title screen like a popup ad. These features all still exist in the code of Origins, but SEGA's Hedgehog Engine menus bypass then. S3K is the only game spared from this because Headcannon were in charge of creating it. 
14. Knuckles not present in CD until Plus because SEGA are lazy fucks who will fleece you for content that should have been included as standard. .
15. The museum sucks. Everything there is a mere couple of clicks away on the Internet in this day and age. 

Origins works. It's not a bad way to play the Classic games, unlike the Classic Collection for the DS. I'd recommend it to other people easily, as long as they're not die-hard Classic Sonic purists. But it is slapdash and lazy. SEGA managed to take the fantastic Retro Engine remakes and make them worse. That's all there is to it. 

[ElectricAngel]

Some corrections I want to make on some of your points there, Blue Blood.

For #3: The reason it looks blurry is due to the Hedgehog Engine frontend and it using bilinear scaling instead of integer scaling, which is supported by the Retro Engine. It wouldn't be a big issue if not for these games being pixel based. With bilinear scaling, the image is upscaled and if the resolution doesn't match 1:1 with the output, guesswork is done to fill in gaps (aka interpolation) which causes the blurred effect. Had they not used Hedgehog Engine, they'd have been able to do integer scaling, which provides the closest 1:1 scale possible to the output resolution. This would mean not getting a fully 4K/1080p image, technically speaking, but to the eyes it would look a lot clearer.

#5: Actually the cutscenes are incorrectly scaled during regular gameplay. The gallery is the only place on Switch where the cutscenes are properly scaled. It's likely due to how the game is programmed in that, the cutscenes are a higher resolution than what the game runs at on Switch, and the Hedgehog Engine just scales it down poorly? The gallery likely uses its own video player that handles it better. At least that's my guess on that.

#8: It's not that the music is at a lower bitrate, but rather that it's run through a low-pass filter. This is probably intentional either to reduce the harshness or to make it sound closer to what it'd sound like on actual Genesis hardware. Weird choice but not a bitrate issue.

But yeah I will say compared to other collections it is severely lacking in customization options in how you want to play. I'll echo again that they should've had an option for lives in Anniversary mode, cutscenes optional, original ROMs in Classic mode, rewind features, save states. This is all standard in every game retro collection these days. 

CRT shaders should've also been included, though what Indigo Rush showed wouldn't have been as easily possible on consoles. Those RetroArch shaders are extremely advanced and mimic the actual makeup of the aperture grill/slot mask, phosphor, halation and diffusion you'd get on an actual CRT. It's remarkable work, especially with how accurately some of them can represent composite video outputs. However, with that said, the clear waterfalls and dithering would only really be seen like that on RF and very specific composite video setups. The Genesis was notorious for rainbowing artifacts on composite video, which heavily affected highly dithered areas like the waterfalls. You could modify it to use S-Video or RGB/SCART, but even on a CRT, it would not dither to make the waterfalls transparent. So I don't really consider that an "intended" look like so many like to claim, because the reality is, for most users it never looked like that in the posted video example. The only benefit for CRT shaders like ones used in Mania is a nostalgia factor, but some like it for the aesthetics and it would've been really easy to just include a few simple ones.

Most of the issues people have wouldn't be there had Sonic Team not insisted on using the Hedgehog Engine. But even then, the core games themselves having weird bugs not present in other versions, on top of lack of features expected in modern releases make it such a hard thing to recommend. It sucks because they got close to making the definitive way to enjoy the classics but dropped the ball on so many things. I could go on about other tidbits I didn't like when it comes to some of the core games like Sonic CD but I'd be making this post way longer than it needs to be. They just should've done better, no excuses.

[Tornado]

The music not only being worse than it was in the mobile releases but for Sonic 3 being worse than it was if recorded off of real hardware (unrelated from the laughable marketing fluff about Senoue returning to finalize the prototype tracks) instantly made it a joke for me. Sega obviously didn't care, so why should I?

That the game runs like shit and looks worse than PC source ports of the mobile versions/A.I.R. and has Denuvo on PC and Sega opted to sell you extra stuff for the game rather than actually fix any of the base game was mostly just noise to me at that point, because I had written them off already. I'd rather just play the actually-definitive Decomps or A.I.R. if I want to play any of these games than reward Sega for making those same things worse.

[Blue Blood]

@ElectricAngelThanks! I appreciate those corrections and your deeper insight. It just makes everything even more baffling and aggravating when you explain the problems with the correct technical knowledge. 

Side note, but a member at Retro recent made a hugely interesting thread going into the technicalities of why the replacement music in S3K Origins sounds so bad. The short of it is that it comes from an unfinished prototype and was definitely not touched up at all for Origins. But I recommend you read the whole thing to get a the full picture. It's very enlightening.