Well like you said subjective opinions and all but I have the completely opposite opinion of yours and I'm a guy that only sticks with great games.
I'll drop a game after a couple of minutes/hours if its not good enough or doesn't feel like it has something interesting going on and that definitely didn't happened with HFW or even the first game, on the contrary.
They raised the bar with the sequel in every single aspect of the game, either you like the story or not that's another question. I did enjoy the story of the first game more but that's mostly due to the theme of mystery going on, which while it's still present in some capacity in the second game it's a completely different tone. Doesn't mean the story is bad tho, it was written by the same guy Alex Gonzalez (he wrote the trilogy).
The game offers a level of immersion above the previous game, with better combat, characters, world design, etc. Could be here all afternoon saying how underrated it is but I won't bother because the people around here have been shitting on the game since it released, so no surprise here.