Eh, I don't know if I can agree with that. I ended up somewhat disappointed with Borderlands 2 compared to the original. A couple things that stood out to me...
- Claptrap went from being a fun side character to a huge annoyance.
- Siren went from being a fun character to being garbage.
- The UI was optimized for consoles over PC, which is expressed in all its negative manner in the talent tree. (You can only see one tree at a time.)
- The Mecromancer has a horrible game design with her Anarchy ability.
- The original was already kind of bad with its nature of adding difficulty through making enemies "bullet sponges", but the sequel takes it to the extreme with the Slag mechanic.
- No DLC matches the awesomeness of Secret Armory of General Knox.
It's obviously very subjective but:
- I for one really liked Claptrap in BL2. He is very far from being an annoyance and he put a smile on my face every time he was there, or just goofying around in the Sanctuary hub. Plus, the writing for him was great (unless you happen to not like that sort of humor, obviously) and the voice actor did an amazing job.
- Not sure what you mean there, you mean Maya specifically? Or Lilith? They're both a 'Siren', but they play rather differently. You might have to elaborate on that one, but I assume that you're referring to how the Siren in BL1 was better than the Siren in BL2? Then that's very subjective too. They're both good on paper for the situations that they're good in, and they both have situations where they wouldn't excel. That goes for all the classes of the three games. There's moments where I'd rather have the Commando's turret, situations or specific enemies where I wish I would Phaselock for more CC, etc. I finished BL2 on my own with all the classes except the Psycho on the two main difficulty settings (Normal, and TVHM) and I never one moment thought that overall Maya was 'garbage'. Nor did I ever think that Lilith in BL1 was ever 'over-powered', she was good but so was the Soldier and the others.
- The UI on PC could have been better, sure. But it does a decent job as it is. I've seen MUCH worse in the likes of Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4, Dragon Age Inquisition and plenty of other games with very large icons, large windows and few maximum items in inventory screens, etc. In Borderlands the UI is 'angled' in such a way as to at the very least give it some style if anything. But in terms of functionality I really have nothing to complain about here.
- I agree with the Anarchy tree being sub optimal, they could have done a better job there. It's too dependent on very specific weapons to be effective, greatly reducing the choices available and arguably the playstyles too (by being so reliant on specifics, one can't really use any and all weapons and be free to explore play styles with all types of weapons, unfortunately). However, to be honest, almost all classes in all three games have at least one 'less popular' or 'less effective' skill tree, or if not there's always a bunch of specific skills that you just don't see the utility of and just usually ignore it. Just taking BL2's Zer0 as an example, I could never be bothered to build him around his Bloodshed / Melee tree since I perceive him as a Sniper more than an "Assassin". But that might just be me. All of this is pretty subjective anyway, even for the Anarchy tree I'm sure some people out there managed to come up with a crazy build for it and would completely disagree with us here.
- Now this I completely agree with. However, I for one mostly ignored Ultimate Vault Hunter Mode until I found a mod that removed enemies' automatic health regeneration (which I always hate in most games, with the rare exceptions when it either makes sense on a specific type of enemy because of lore-related reasons for example, or when it's done on a Boss but the mechanic isn't the only one trick gimmick it has to provide a 'challenge'). Until I found that mod I was always content with "just" completing BL2's Normal and True Vault Hunter settings. I did play UHVM with the Commando, originally (before the mod came in) and couldn't be bothered to stay in that mode past Level 53 or 54 (I was Level 51 I believe on that Commando when I finished the game in TVHM).
The mechanic of having to Slag enemies first, and then switch to another weapon to finish the job, I thought, was a complete misunderstanding on the developers' part on how (else) creatively they could have provided a superior challenge over TVHM. You don't have to give enemies cheap health regeneration (which pretty much ensures that it just ain't gonna die if it wasn't Slagged first) to ensure "challenge" is there. They could have come up with more creative ideas, new enemy types, new mini bosses per map regions, completely new types of weapons used by enemies, different spawn points, decreasing money earned or found in chests and containers, increasing prices in vending machines, etc. But indeed the default UVHM in BL2 is rather atrocious in design. That part of BL2, in my opinion, is its single most obvious and clear-as-day negative; its major flaw. And I will always think that Pre-Sequel's version of UVHM went in a better direction for having removed the Slag mechanic altogether (from what I read anyway, because I never actually played TSP's UVHM yet).
- Again, rather subjective concerning the DLCs for the three games. I also liked Secret Armory. But I strongly believe that Tiny Tina's Assault is the best DLC of the Borderlands trilogy overall. Then again yeah, it's my opinion. I just preferred it over the others, but I liked most of the DLCs for both BL1 and BL2 honestly (most, but not all).
I mean, I'm not saying that BL2 is "perfect", like
actually perfect. But it's one such game that I like to consider
virtually perfect. It has flaws, but there's so many positives that they far outweigh them. It's in the veins of other similar games (for me, that is) in the likes of Witcher 3, Breath of the Wild, Diablo 2, Super Mario World, Super Metroid, Quake, etc (I.E. not comparing them and saying that they're all the same, they're different types of games; but they are what I like to refer to as 'virtually perfect' games). I do strongly believe that BL2 is, for all intent and purposes absolutely superior overall, over BL1 and Pre-Sequel. And I will be extremely shocked if Borderlands 3 tops the sequel, even if I do suspect that they will keep the formula relatively untouched (I.E. I feel like it's still going to be about 'Vault Hunting', but that the scale will be tripled, we might even travel from one planet to another, and it might have a very heavy online aspect to it which I'm not sure if I'd like to see happen; but time will tell).