I felt this way for a while until I decided to sit down, start a new game, and engage with it.

It's a completely different game, it just doesn't look like it if you picked back up where you left off. Without the right context, you have a tendency to just repeat what you were doing before, and it feels like nothing changed.

But believe me, everything changed. You should revisit it, because I don't think you've seen the actual changes to the game.