The crafting New Horizons Items system is cool, however the lack of infinite durability tools has essentially made me never want to touch the game again. Or any tools will need to break. Can it be just a mild annoyance to make/buy brand new tools? Sure. In Breath of the Wild, your firearms burst. Some found this annoying, I quite liked it. Why? And that I had lots of weapons at once and gathered them so changing to some other weapon wasn't a chore. At New Horizons, switching to a different fishing pole after yours breaks changes nothing about the gameplay. Each pole is just like the last, there's no importance to any fishing pole. Unless you're actively timing your usage to coincide with excursions to offer your fish then you'll have to waste time working into a store or crafting seat. It is a badly designed system that straight up ruined fishing and bug catching.

Talking of insect catching, Nintendo decided to destroy that too. Outside of grabbing beetles on the island at New Leaf, insect catching has always been terrible for making money. It had been so much easier to capture fish. Several bugs with solid spawn rates were worth good money. I had been enjoying making 300k or so one hour by actively catching bugs. Given the costs of the big ticket items in the shop, that seemed about fair, and was pretty equivalent to fishing. Subsequently Nintendo nerfed the spawn levels of the great bugs for seemingly no reason. They also cracked down on the interest you have for having bells in the bank. It seemed just like Nintendo believed it was too easy to make money, but they ignored the biggest moneymaker, the Stalk Market. In previous matches, the Stalk Market has been an actual gamble. Visiting other cities was a really involved process, so you're essentially relying on your own prices. With the growth of social networking and the relative ease of seeing other islands (a procedure that's still dogshit awful, Nintendo never stops to amaze with their online ineptitude) it became trivial to find a good turnip price each week not to only double, but triple or quadruple your investment. And with the increased inventory, buying a large number of turnips was insignificant. So people could easily create millions of bells with minimal effort and almost zero risk.

Do I think I'll go back to New Leaf? No, not actually. The Switch is easier to perform with its faster load times and bigger display. There are nonetheless a few very welcome cheap Animal Crossing Bells QoL improvements.