I'm not 'creating a narrative' so come off it, never did I say 'nobody could possibly hav eliked what they saw' or anything to include you if you somehow magically thoguht it looked amazing, what I'm saying is that the overwhelming impressions people had were bad, and this is shit you can simply look up the threads for the E3 conferences, gamecom information, etc, and SEE people posting. The hype surrounding this game got lesser each time they showed it, because it did not look good to most people every time they did.
Well, you've got to understand that a part of that negativity came from concern trolls and console fanboys of other platforms who were butthurt that a Platinum game is coming exclusively to Xbox after they perhaps liked Bayonetta 1, 2, Vanquish and/or Wonderful 101. There's also the fact that hyper-negativity is a real thing in the Interwebz, where people just like to shit on things far more than they deserve to be shat on. The slightest of flaws in an unfinished game means the game will be worthless shit and can't possibly be good, hype deflated, cancel the party. There's also a pretty vocal anti-Platinum force who like to come to all Platinum threads to say how Platinum's games are actually pretty shitty and nothing special, no matter if we are talking about a somewhat rough looking upcoming game like Scalebound, the actual shit games like TMNT, a character action game masterpiece like Bayonetta or third person shooter greatness of Vanquish.
Still, you can't say that the game looked like a total disaster. So a big boss was didn't look super exciting to fight against and there were framerate issues, but all the individual parts looked & sounded like they could form an entertaining whole with some more work, balancing & polish but into it. As I said framerate problems can some of the last things that are focused on during the polishing phase when content is locked and the big boss is the kind of stuff that can really change with game balance tweaking and when all gameplay systems are fully implemented so your actions aren't as limited as an early-ish demo of a really unfinished build of the game might make it look like.
As a comparison the Duscae demo of FFXV, 1,5 years before the release of the game, had this big boss to fight that wasn't all that fun because you were missing a lot of key features so it just dragged on forever with a very limited, repetitive gameplay loop. While it's still not perfect in the finalized game either, it's still far more enjoyable with the full arsenal & gameplay features of the final game. I saw similar potential in Scalebound. They had already shown a fairly robust combat system but with Platinum games there is always more than some surface level live demonstration shows. You get new skills, weapons, special attacks as you progress in the game that can make the game feel like a whole different game vs. relative simplicity of the early game. I doubt they even showed half of what the game's combat would offer in all their short demos we saw, like the dragon <-> MC combo stuff was never shown to public.
The difference is Horizon is showing really well and development is apparently going very smooth.
MS knows something we don't, and analysts/critics who see more than we do have been worried about Scalebound for a while based on actually seeing it. The game had serious issues, they wouldn't have cancelled it at this point if it was going to come out this year and actually be any good. This game had to either be really far behind, really disjointed, or so bad that releasing it as a headlining exclusive would hurt the Xbox brand more than canceling it.
It's showing well because its been in some level of development from, what, 2010 onwards or something. Sony gave Guerrilla proper time to fully gestate it from early vague ideas and early prototype testing with a small team into a fully fleshed out, polished product with as few compromises as possible and didn't show it to the public until it was already really far along into development. They even gave Guerrilla the money to set up a second dev studio to work on the game. The game has had something like 6-7 years of work put into it. Even though much of that was with a very small team for the first couple of years, that can help with the full production to go much smoother when they've got most of the ideas somewhat fleshed out and nailed down as they ramp up development and enter full production vs. having to go from zero to completion in 3 years (including prototyping and other early development stuff and the full production phase of development with all hands on deck)