Yea that's just down to personal tastes. Exodus wasn't necessarily a bad game. It just didn't feel like a Metro game.

The first two games in the Metro series exemplified a rich, linear story experience with intricate and interwoven characters, condensed level design, and strict resource management. They had a very specific and distinct atmosphere and experience. There was very little extra fluff outside of hidden secrets and logs. Everything was centered around telling the story it wanted to tell, even down to the gameplay mechanics themselves like using bullets for currency.

Exodus broke away from a lot of it to have a more open experience which unfortunately required a lot of fluff to fill the empty space of an open world design. The events in each region didn't really have anything to make me care about it. Even if it does provide a much larger view of how society outside of the Metro had adapted, a lot of the content just didn't feel any connection to Artyom and crew like it was in the older games.
The open world aspect also completely invalidated the resource management aspect of the Metro games. They were not able to pull it off in the way that Stalker's very intricate economy systems do for making an open world with the feeling of limited resources. It was way too easy to farm stuff. I never worried about bullets after the first hours, in a series where bullets are supposed to be scarce enough for use as currency.

As a long time fan of Metro, Exodus kinda felt like something "other" wearing the skin of the series rather than an actual Metro game. I feel they wanted to have a good, traditional Metro experience but it is everything else that feels added on to try and bring in a wider audience that resulted in a lot of older Metro fans, like me, feeling like the game was half-baked.