Yeah, I feel this!
For me, those hundreds of thousands (millions?) of hours of playtesting for the core of the game really show - I find that combat in the first two tiers runs like a charm. In that regard, 5e is probably the least painful iteration of D&D to date. And that's a great deal of what I need from the game.
But the rest of it is intensely, and increasingly, frustrating - the entire interaction and exploration pillars are barely half-baked, high level support is essentially non-existent, the adventures have been generally poor (with one shining exception), the rules supplements are worse, and the less said about the settings the better. But worse than the simple lack is all the areas where the game actively works against me in various ways - darkvision is just too ubiquitous, encumbrance is just too generous, and so on.
So it's the best version of D&D I've found, and yet it really annoys me.
That said, I have found that it feels rather better if you use the rulebook from the Essentials Kit as "the rules", and the PHB as basically a big splatbook for PC races, classes, spells (but ignoring the additional rules). The constraint of that much reduced page count forced them to drop everything extraneous, organise carefully, and generally forced them to do a good job.