Honestly, I didn’t hate this game. Yes, the camera is terrible at times, the bosses are tedious and yes it sucks that you can't play as X right from the start and Zero is absolute trash, etc. etc.

But I can appreciate the devs wanting to try something different, especially after the trainwreck that was X6. And the final product isn't all that bad.

I liked the Chip upgrade system. I liked Axl's machine gun (turn on Auto Repeat for that). I liked that Axl would sometimes receive a new normal gun based on a boss power, the Rocket Launcher (Explosion) was especially cool and very strong too. I liked being able to switch characters on the fly. Most stages were fine. The majority of the 2D sections weren’t bad and some of the 3D sections were pretty alright too. It's just when you get to a 3D section with awful camera that you can't rotate that it became really annoying.
The bosses were the weakest part of this game for me. All of them took way too long to kill since they have a shitton of health and a few of them have very annoying mechanics to boot. Like the Hyena (although his crazy screaming also made me laugh) and Red.
And because of the bosses being as bad as they are I was really dreading the Teleporter Room. It didn’t help that the final stages preceding that were some of the worst in this game too.
As for the other stages, I thought most of them were alright. Apart from the Red/Sigma stages, only the Ride Chaser (Central Circuit) stage and the Cyber Field stage were truly bad.
I pretty much only used Axl for the whole game and very rarely X when the Charge shot would be better.