Some other common complaints I typically see for Dark Dawn is not being able to explore as much as the overworld map would have you believe. Didn't make sense for most players that you could only explore the right side of the world map from Lost Age, and, even then, there weren't nearly as many points of interests and towns to explore.
The other one is that at a certain point, the game flings you out into nothing with very little direction as to what to do next. It doesn't help that in conjunction with that, you get a bad taste of PoNR early on, so you become 100X more frantic in exploring things. You basically don't know if you'll lock yourself off again because you went and met a character too early or destroyed some ancient civilization by listening to Kraden for too long.
Maybe because of limitations at the time too, there were far less psynergy to use in dungeons outside battle. The original GS had something like 14 - Move, Catch, Carry, Lift, Frost, Douse, Force, Whirlwind, Mind Read, Reveal, Ply, Cloak, Growth, Halt. The game would slowly introduce them to you and then put them in the puzzle elements. Lost Age added on top of that even with more interesting stuff. Everyone's favorite Sand, to name one. Dark Dawn took a step back on that quite a bit for some reason, and that's why the puzzling elements weren't as in depth. Or at least that's why they didn't feel that way.
With the bad, there was good though. Individualized Djinni sprites, characters will keep on attacking even if the enemy wasn't selected, fantastic looking summons and sword releases. Good looking enemy sprites and animations when you defeat them and hit them. Unique playable characters that people wanted - like a pure mage Venus Adept and a fun half-animal Jupiter adept. I mean, even though people talk bad about Dark Dawn, the same people will talk about how much they love Sveta or Himi. The problem ultimately, is that people didn't expect it to be GS1 all over again, which spiritually it was. It was the prologue to what was supposed to be the big bang in the next game.
There were too many hints all throughout the game to clue in on that. Treasure chests you could never access but could actually see. The feel and scope of the story and places you went to. Setting up of various places you never ultimately went. The parallels are just too many to name.
