Ah. Well the gameplay, especially the gunplay, powers and combos with them are improved an awful lot and melee has taken a whole new dimension with the Skyhook you might still have a few gripes with it. Health and Salt (this titles version of Mana) are still not of the regenerating type so you do end up playing a hobo simulator where your looking in bins and boxes, even the guy you've just butchered for top ups but they are in such an abundance you got to be a right clot to run out.
It's a hard to say to someone if they didn't like BioShock to say "Yeah but it's changed now" and expect them to immediately like it. I think only you can decide if it does enough better to grip you. Though the world is much, much better to explore (you'd have to be pretty jaded not to enjoy the setting and characters) every aspect of the interactions feels like it's a lot smoother and polished.
In a way the game doesn't want you to hang around so encounters are fast paced, yet very tactical, the exploration isn't spending 30 mins searching everything as all the collectables, optional objectives and locked doors are in plain sight. I know some people want to explore ever tiny little facet of a game and are a bit perturbed that either the game or Elizabeth are pushing you onwards but it's incredibility hard to tell a great cohesive story while the game has to wait for the player to catch up. Some open world games do it well in chunks or with an over arching narrative with side stories to fill in the lulls but Infinite is planed out to a tee. Look at it this way can you imagine watching a film where just before or after every pivitol scene the film abruptly stopped and we saw the actors just standing around for 10 mins or watched them rummaged around the set. It would stop the film dead.