Your "and then some" conveniently elides that it seems to lack all of the things I care about--much like Farmville, which is not only not charming, but manages to work its way over to putrid. For reference, I hate The Sims, too.
What I see in the dev list is a lot of numbers. "You can do THIS MANY x and OVER y MANY z." To me, all of this means lots and lots of grinding in order to make something in a game that I'd rather just doodle out on paper. Does it really add to the game to have a crafting system that big? Does that much customizability add, or detract? How about the lack of story-driven gameplay? How does that interact with the genre?
In my opinion, the last good--perhaps the only good--Harvest Moon game was Harvest Moon 64, with Magical Melody making it into the "sort of okay" slot. And, in my further humble opinion, the main thing bringing the series down is the urge to expand everything in size. More vegetable types! More vegetables in your plot! Ten romance options, all as deep as seen in a game published 10 years ago! Remove the border between farm and town so you can plant stuff pretty much anywhere! More recipes! More crafting! A whole busy screenful of people and animals running around in way too little space!
Well, you know, that adds time to the game, sure, if you can make larger vegetable plots--and it adds time you can spend grinding things out to try each romance option, if not any further satisfaction--and removing that border makes your day last a lot longer, and makes your route a lot more circuitous--but is time really what you're looking for?
Let's be honest: I feel like they took a Harvest Moon game and are grafting all the things I hate most about Animal Crossing and Terraria onto it. I don't feel this improves the Harvest Moon formula, really. It just adds three games' worth of things I dislike, rather than only one.
Unfortunately, not everyone is going to share your enthusiasm, and I'm really frustrated because it seems like a lot of games I used to like are moving in this direction, rather than the opposite.