I played SA2: Battle a lot on GameCube when I was ~13 years old, enjoyed most of it, even managed to get all 180 of those medallion thingies. (Though I accidentally deleted my save file later on, which was unpleasant.)
I think I might have more of a tolerance for filler than most people do. I thought the Tails/Robotnik robot levels were fine, often kinda technical and satisfying to do well, though they could get clunky and janky in platformy parts and obviously they're not what you come to a Sonic game for. I found the Knuckles/Rouge treasure hunts passable and sometimes interesting, but the narrow focus on treasure-hunting using a "warm/cold" detector got old fast. The regimented split into speed/robot/treasure obviously wasn't ideal -- they could've stood do something more like a Mario-style open-ended level thing with the Knuckles/Rouge stuff, those characters had suitable mechanics and the levels for the treasure hunts were actually mostly interesting enough, to a point where if they actually populated those levels with interesting things to do rather than just plonking a bunch of random treasure drop locations throughout I think they could've been really good.
The jump-dash homing attack thing that Sonic does in the 3D games seems like a point of contention for some people, but I think it's actually the game's best mechanic, and tbh I prefer it over trying to jump on goombas as Mario in 3D Mario games. (Thank fuck for Cappy in Odyssey.) They realized that the good ol' 2D "jump on enemies' heads to kill them" mechanic was kinda bad in 3D, so they designed a mechanic that makes the problem go away. That's good game design. Also, in SA2 they use it for traversal in good ways, e.g. forcing you to make combinatorial decisions about which floating robot enemy to attack next as you cross a ravine, snap decisions to hit the "special" drone thingy when it appears, etc. It can also get trippy in a good way -- I remember accidentally getting Sonic to go into orbit around a jump dash target once, which thankfully you could cancel out of with a button press. There were situations where the jump-dash interacted badly with camera angles to make certain shots hard to pull off, though.
Combine the jump-dash with the grind, the ring dash, and the somewhat janky but mostly good bounce you get later on, and I think Sonic had a pretty satisfying traversal repertoire in SA2. Modern games like Sunset Overdrive ape a lot of it to good effect, which I think implicitly vindicates SA2 Sonic's moveset in hindsight. I think the only major issue I had with Sonic's movement was something Jim Sterling talked about once: Sonic "steers" in a very finnicky and acute way at high speeds in 3D Sonic games, which doesn't gel well with expectations about inertia and also makes it just plain difficult to course-correct. The snowboard sections are really bad at this, which is disappointing because otherwise the snowboard sections are really cool.
The Sonic/Shadow level designs are something I'm mixed on -- I think they're pretty good, if I ignore the jank around the edges and the occasional bad idea (e.g. that awful bit in the Egypt level where you have to go off to the side to retrieve and carry back a key) and the whole issue of all the loop-de-loops and spectacle and whatnot being empty calories. I used to time trial the Green Forest level, which is probably my favourite 3D Sonic level, and which makes speedruns of that level really fascinating to watch. (On this note, SA2 has a surprisingly wild physics engine. It enables some trippy things that speedrunners take advantage of, like running up arbitrary walls if you get the setup right.)
They introduced Shadow in SA2, who is basically the edgiest edgelord hedgehog imaginable, which is exactly what 13-year-old me wanted; and Rouge, who...uhh, yiff? I think I could basically tolerate SA2 levels of cringy character designs and plotlines, even find it endearing in parts (but I want nothing to do with the bestial aspect of Sonic '06) if they got their shit together on the gameplay.
I remember putting more time into the Chao stuff than is reasonable. It was a time of virtual pets, and the main game fed you lots of stuff to feed to your Chaos, and there were a bunch of Chao minigames and different gardens to keep them in and other crap going on, so it was a weirdly addictive thing to check back in on. It's kinda unsettling to think about how much time I must've wasted in that stupid thing now.
I've come back to this game a few times since I was 13. The jankiness of the controls is more evident to me now than it was back then, probably because all old games are evidently mechanically unrefined in hindsight. Otherwise I don't think anything I've said above is badly wrong -- it's a mixed bag, with some very good ideas, some bad ideas, evident jank in parts, some requirement that you patiently play through filler, but a core moveset for Sonic that comes together well and allows a lot of satisfying traversal, which the game would've been better for leaning further into.
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ftr, I think my favourite Sonic game has to be S3&K. I played the Master System version of Sonic 2 when I was a kid, which I have fond memories of; I think the Genesis/Megadrive version of Sonic 2 is actually kinda barebones compared to S3&K, and I don't like the level ideasas much as the Master System version. (Chemical Plant is just bad.) S3&K is a much more fleshed-out and content-packed game in every possible way. Mania is probably my second-favourite Sonic game now: it's a very S3&K game that they've taken in some wacky new directions that should probably elevate it to number 1, but I think I just have a greater fondness for S3&K's levels. (Did they have to bring back Chemical Plant? Fuck that place.)
The 3D Sonics obviously don't rate next to 2/3&K/Mania 2D Sonics. I don't think they've ever refined Sonic's moveset to be the kind of traversal crack that I think SA2 demonstrates it has the potential to be, and the level design has been hit-and-miss in a way that leaves open what a good 3D Sonic level should be. (Though I think Metal Harbour and Green Forest are the best candidates.) Should 3D Sonic integrate more open-ended ideas a la 3D Mario, whilst somehow still preserving the speed-traversal-oriented gameplay? What does that look like? (I think 3D Knuckles would do pretty well lifting Odyssey-style level design almost wholesale, so there's that.) I don't think the whole "jumping back and forth between 2D and 3D to satisfy both audiences" approach is doing the development of 3D Sonic mechanics any favours (or even sating 2D Sonic fans), fwiw.
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