I like Rondo but I agree with OP. Outside of the final 2 stages (boss rush included) and a couple of other moment like Death, Dracula X is boring.

Wanna know why it's held in such high regards? Because it's one of those games with fluid controls and great presentation so it makes anyone who plays like for even just 2 mins feel like a badass. Even when they're not really doing anything. This coupled with the extremely low difficulty of the game until the final 2 stages (and if that wasn't enough, even real shitters can get far in the game by using Maria and one/two shotting every in the game) means that anyone can play through a lot of stages.

But in the end, the game is flat, boring, does very little with its enemies to be engaging and instead it's just the same flat scenarios again and again,

On top of this the multi path system is a fucking mess, and there are a lot of hints throughout the game that they released an unfinished product (the most obvious one to me isn't even the infamous dead end accessible with Maria; but the fact that in stage 2-B the alt exit at the start of the stage going towards the left and the alt exit at the end of the stage going towards the right lead to the same stage. That and the entirety of stage 5-B which I believe was thrown in as a post game bonus precisely because it's unfinished).