After Three Houses, fans went back to loving the series. Fates was really bad after people had concerns with Awakening. Mainly story and gameplay. Three Houses fixes these issues by telling an actually fleshed out story and being a fun game with waifus taking a backseat. It's not perfect, but it's a great step in the right direction.
Like compare all of the controversy with Fates (face petting, body swaps, straight syrums, barbarian asses, literally Tharja 2) and then compare it to Three Houses (nothing).
I agree, Three Houses is a great game that managed to unify most of the community. About Fates, it has issues and I'm not the greatest fan of Fates, in the most literal sense of the word. Fates Birthright is pretty easy, Fates Revelations is... well. But Fates Conquest is the best route of Fates.
Conquest isn't the best when it comes to story and writing (which is a bit sad in my opinion because I think most of the main characters of Nohr and Hoshido are cool. But what I was saying is that Conquest is the best Fates version due to it's gameplay, difficulty and map design. I'm not precisely attached to Fates except for the music, which is great, but I'm not exaggerating if I say that Conquest is probably one of the best games in the series when it comes to map design. Sure, there are some maps that may feel annoying, but overall it does a great job offering interesting maps with different objectives. Of course, all of this wouldn't work at all if the gameplay itself and the difficulty aren't good, and luckily Conquest is the most demanding Fates title.
Fates actually fixes some of Awakening's issues such as the pair up mechanic, which was a broken mechanic in the right hands. Enemies couldn't use the pair up neither dual strikes. In Fates, they gave enemies the chance to use both mechanics. Oh, and now having 2 units paired up isn't always the best option, because the second unit wouldn't be able to attack, so sometimes you will have to think what will be better for you: pairing two units, or separate both in order to perform a dual strike.
In Awakening pretty much of the time you'd rather have two units paired up because the game never punished you for doing that. I mean, you could beat most of the game very easily pairing up Robin and Chrom and let them fight all the enemies.
I'm saying all of this because while I agree that Fates has a good amount of problems, from a gameplay standpoint is a great FE title and pretty much better than Awakening, at least if we're talking about Fates Conquest, which in Hard is a pleasant and demanding experience.
I've barely tried Conquest on Lunatic, but at least it doesn't seem to be as absurd as Awakening's Lunatic mode, where you were practically forced to use Frederick all of the time.