I don't know what you mean with "dinky and odd".
Small enemy sprites, gimmicky 'collection of spheres and parts' bosses like most of Konami's Mega Drive games, poorly animated compared to contemporary games at release (and clunky badly drawn animations), a bunch of ridiculous shit like robots, and the absolute stupidity of trying to link Castlevania's MGM monster movie universe with Bram Stoker's Dracula novel.
It's fun and still good, and has a great soundtrack, but a low-ambition small game made without much continuity with or respect for what had come before.
Bloodlines is razor-sharp - the only 16-bit CV with the fixed jumps of the NES games, but it throws in a perfect amount of additions to your toolset that let you play more offensively without trivializing the level designs (something even Rondo doesn't totally get right, really).
Dracula X and Dracula XX both have the NES games' fixed jumps. And I wouldn't call VK/Bloodlines 'Razor sharp' it's kind of a loose scrappy game IMO. Clunky animations everywhere.
X68K is way more successful at what it does than 4. Perfect length, perfect level of difficulty, dense stages with well-placed enemies and hazards, some really amazing boss fights (the werewolf is among the series' best)
I prefer the SNES game, which is its own thing, less of a stock remake.
CV4 is very '80s 16 bit arcade' to me, except for being too easy. It really hit that Wardner/Ghouls n Ghosts kind of vibe.
4 is definitely way better than Dracula X though. That game feels like a fucked up, amateur-designed ROM hack. Even then it's still not straight-up bad, but it's not really worthwhile compared to any of the other CVs from that era.
DXX actually has fantastically designed graphics tiles, on a superficial level it has superior graphics to DX. but was seemingly rushed at the end, and the actual level layouts ended up rom-hacky.
A bigger cart and three more months it had potential to be great, it has a great engine and very nicely done tile work. It kind of sucks due to the lost potential really.
ADX is easily the towering winner of the gen however. So much detail, consistency and respect for what came before.