Given with SA1 the camera and controls got worse with every port I'd take issue with that. The Dreamcast version still plays much better than any other version of the game.
The cut scenes were always bad, but the story is fine. It fleshed out the lore in a meaningful way and rarely dipped into grimdark territory the way later games (even SA2) did, to everyone's derision. The Rashomon style of storytelling is also super interesting for a series like Sonic with such a low target age.
Hire some talented writers (read: not Pontac and Graff) and you could easily make something entertaining out of the story.
The story was definitely more palatable in SA1 (and Heroes, for that matter) than the cringeworthy attempts at dark, serious stories they came up with in SA2 and Shadow. I was never a huge fan of the story and setting in SA1 though, suddenly having a Sonic game set in 'our world' rather than the more fiction-like setting of the old games just felt kinda... out of place.
Never played the DC version of SA1, just the PC port and the later PS3 port, and my god is the camera beyond help in those ports. The controls are awful too, and having to hear Robotnik howling about 'get a load a' this' over and over again, every bossfight against him, was grating to say the least.
It's not the worst game ever obviously, but Sonic as a series took a steep decline in quality with the transition to 3D. Sega trying their hand at so many different gameplay styles and story styles has just created a mess with fans who only like the 2D games, fans who like the 2D and the more lighthearted 3D games, fans who only care about the more serious 3D games, fans who like the Adventure style but not the twitchy boost style, fans who like the twitchy boost style but finds the Adventure style boring, and of course the.. weirder part of the fanbase. You know the one.
Either way, I don't think Sonic Team has a clear vision for what they want Sonic as a series to be, what to do with it or where to take it. So whatever they make this time, after 20+ years of mostly bad to mediocre games from them, I have no hope this will be the game that rights all the wrongs of the past.
