rpgs take time and investment and are often intentionaly convoluted without it adding anything to the game; talking fetch quests, backtracking and all that crap thats just there to stretch playtime here.
There's just three types of quest really. Go somewhere, get something, kill something. The amount of iterations you can do there are quite limited not by design, but by simple logic. Everything else enters the realm of mini game within a game that becomes an entirely different discussion.
Backtracking though, is something that
entirely depends on the framing. Some of the best games of all time feature a lot of backtracking and in that case it usually depends on the content density. Symphony of the Night comes to mind as major contender in that regard and also as an easily RPG-fiable formular.
Good backtracking, like good storytelling, uses foreshadowing to prime a reaction. Bad backtracking always feels arbitrary.
dating sims... long time since i last touched one that interested me. most are extremely formularic and simply based on point accumulation
That's just most games. It entirely depends on the layer of abstraction and obfuscation. But that's a very fine line to tread between 'unreadable mess' and your criticism. Sadly, this genre specifically has been around for so long that we have a lot of data on what generally works. And people prefer readability.