I don't think anyone playing monster hunter would say the enjoyment comes simply from 'winning'. You could 'win' by spending 50 minutes on every monster playing super defensively. On the contrary much of the fun emerges from the depth of the gameplay alone, and the idea of clean, good, satisfying fights taking precedence over everything else. I think using that strawman argument makes less sense talking about MonHan than almost any other game, because simply reaching a particular goal is not of much interest to any MH fan.
I was in the 4th stage of fighting a Rathalos and came from the side during a fireball spewing to head-knock it down and thrashed on it. It got up and started swinging the tail so I rolled out and around to the platform that I intentionally stopped it at to jump from and mounted and thrashed again. It got all ragey with just fireballs and wind everywhere so I ran back far climbed up to eye level so it'd glide over to try and knock me down, but I used a flash bomb to knock it down and thrash on it more. It got up so I roll wall grab->leap shot for another mount and add another full padded spirit combo after that. It started limping away and off the edge of the plateau so I run and jumped over to do an air strike final blow.
Rathalos is no joke, but you can be smart and work with it to make openings and do that kind of thing. It's hard when it's raging, and much harder in a flat and/or small area, but if you have room to run around, it isn't too bad. Harder monsters than that seem to always be in rage mode, with roars and tremors and wind and skin-explosions and sudden dashes to interrupt anything, so you can only do anything when it is completely safe entering and existing because you know 100% the monster can't do anything in that moment. It takes the balance out of whack away from dance and into the realm of exploits like the bombs/traps.
Another pain for me is still the camera. It is trash. You can only read monsters if you can see them, so that means always away from walls since the camera is utter garbage near walls. It also means keeping your attacks around the outside of the monster, since often under them can be safe for a certain attack or two, but then your vision is blocked and you can't read when they'll run and trample you or something. So the constant battle for positioning just to maintain a half-decent camera while also not in their attack zones is a big distraction/needless complication in the more hectic fights with raging monsters, preventing pure read and response gameplay that other action games have.
