Picross 3D - played through.
Strike one: The game runs off 'normal' picross rules the whole time, with no option to ever use 'free' picross rules. I don't think there should be any opposition to the claim that the normal rules are terrible.
You can make the argument that since the irrelevant blocks are being destroyed in this game rather than just being marked off, it wouldn't make any sense to be able to bring them back. I don't think that's sufficient reason, but ultimately they could be changed to being phased in and out or so forth. Then there's the question of how to be sure you're phasing in the right block, which is simply fixed by a) disabling the ability to affect blocks outside the currently selected slice in slice mode and b) fixing the issue where you can't select one of the slices currently facing you in slice mode. You spend 85% of the puzzle in slice mode anyway, and most of the leftover time is only due to the aforementioned issue. I had resets due to accidentally incorrectly shattering blocks outside the current slice, and due to misinterpreting blocks as being in the currently-facing slice when they weren't, so even if the free rules weren't added both these fixes would be useful.
Strike two: Every level is timed.
This ain't regular picross timing where you get generally ludicrously long times which really only come into play in the normal ruleset, as in the normal ruleset you get increasing time penalties for each mistake. Here you essentially need to restart the puzzle on your first mistake, there's no time penalty. The times are just actually, and often easily, failable now - especially on the higher difficulty puzzles. Brings back bad memories of Super Picross's huge boards that gave me multiple failures by timeout.
There is nothing I like better than doing a puzzle for half an hour and then having to restart and spend another half an hour just because for some bizarre reason the game designers decided that I needed to complete it within that time. This is not why I play Picross.
A lot of boards were timed in Pokémon Picross, but the vast majority of the time you could trivialise them by stacking your party with slow-time or freeze-time Pokémon; it's not like you were going to use any of the reveal ones unless there was a mission which required it. Sometimes you had a mission to complete the board without any Pokémon, and so forth. I don't mind occasionally having a timer. But not one on every single puzzle, and definitely not one that's going to make me have to play every second puzzle multiple times on the higher difficulties.
Ultimately, I lost any qualms I had about memorizing parts of the puzzle and directly filling them out on reattempts in these situations.
Also keep in mind that on top of the lower time limits, Picross 3D is also a lot slower than regular Picross, given that you can't see the entire puzzle at once.
Strike three: Making me manually remove "0" rows/columns/aisles.
Game. If you can't present to me a way to manually remove every "0" row/etc. on a given face without having to constantly shift the angle of the face so I can see the blocks at the far side. Just give me a button to automatically shatter all "0" blocks. I'm already angry enough that I've had to restart this puzzle multiple times due to the terrible timer, I do not want to have more restarts just because I hit blocks outside the "0" row because of the angling.
Ultimately, I never completely got the hang of things. Fairly often I would run into situations where I'd gone over every slice from multiple faces and failed to find any way to progress, and given the timer breathing down your back makes the game not lend itself to not making progress, ended up trying to divine which blocks might be shatterable from what was currently completed. Some times this worked, some times this lead to having to restart the puzzle. It feels like most of the times I got stuck there was either a 1-block markable somewhere that I was overlooking, or there was a circle/square row somewhere which had particular configurations which were impossible. Again with the latter, if you sit there considering every possible configuration for every one of those, that's a recipe for running out of time - there are a number of shortcuts for some configurations, at least. (For example, with a circle-4 row, if you currently have a line of 4 available blocks and a separate single available block, you can theoretically immediately tell that the single is required and the two in the centre of the set of 4 are required.)
Seems kind of like I somehow have a better grasp of Mega Picross than Picross 3D, and Mega Picross is terrible.
It feels like the game really needed to have the blue markings which you get naturally in Picross e or via water Pokémon in Pokémon Picross.
On the positive side: Construction puzzles are much, much better than Micross. Mainly as they typically don't consist of ridiculous amounts of simple puzzles, but the framing is also better (in that there isn't really any). I'd like for Jupiter to take notes from this for their next Picross game, except 3D originally came out ages ago so they obviously didn't.
Hopefully when Picross 3D 2 comes out over here I will find that they have fixed a heap of the problems of the first game, but I have a horrible feeling that they've probably fixed nothing.
