> I have played the DE version of GTA 3 (in fact I just finished) and it wasn't nearly as bad as they make it out to be. In fact I would say it's a better experience than the originals for those who haven't played them. Of all the bugs I've experienced, almost all of them were in the original release, which I played extensively. It's best to ignore youtubers and generally disagreeable nerds from reddit and all those places. They feed on hate.
While I don't disagree with your experience at all of it being better than the originals, that is unfortunately just part of the issue here. The background is that Take Two has been very litigious, and a number of high-quality mods are no longer relevant due to their actions.
I may be misremembering the details but iirc there was a very high quality GTA4 graphics mod that essentially gave the game "modern" graphics that too was forced to stop due to legal issues(to say nothing of the GTA3/VC etc mods). GTA 5 loading times were very high until a single guy fixed their shitty code with a mod.
Take Two isn't just poorly managed or have poor code quality (which they do), they are also hostile to users wanting to modify their game. A good bit of the criticism here isn't specific to the game itself (which for eg may be fine once it loads) but rather their behaviour.