I know how everyone feels about MKX, I honestly agree, the game was a mess in a lot of ways and I much prefer Injustice 2. But I definitely enjoyed it and I sure as hell played it a lot and I know a ton of us put a lot of time into it too, even some of those who “hate” it still found themselves dumping tons of time into it.
It did a lot of things wrong but here’s some things I loved about it
1. Character designs. Returning characters look amazing, having the elements we expect but they’re updated and they all look tougher and deadlier. New characters look great too, especially Kotal and D’Vorah, although Jacqui is a little bland.
2. It was fun to watch. For the same reasons it was a lot of times frustrating to play, the fast explosiveness of the game made watching it really fun and intense because any game could get turned on its head, and you yourself didn’t have to watch your hard work and life lead get Quan Chi’d away.
3. Brutalities. Obviously they are very satisfying to watch but even better is absolutely destroying someone and doing a very hard brutality, there’s nothing more satisfying than being able to beat someone that bad or as shitty as having one of those done on you.
4. It was addicting. Idk, I recognize it wasn’t a great game, especially compared to the balance of I2. But it was so addicting to play because of how lighting fast it was, games never lasted long and you just wanted to play another.
You are making a couple of assumptions here that I beg to disagree with. Vanilla MKX was unbalanced, yes, but after several patches the game became a lot fairer and far from being a "mess". I2 has back to block + ambiguous cross-over jump. First off, ambiguous cross-overs on their own are not a good thing to have in a fighting game, because their animations looks awkward and unnatural, but even more than that, they are not a test of skill of any kind, it's just random luck and as such, it is very frustrating for players to deal with. Second of all, when combined with back to block, ambiguous cross-overs are extremely annoying and frustrating. Such a thing has no place in a fighting game. To me, that is the definition of a mess. Even the inclusion of Raiden hasn't been enough to keep me playing that game (that should tell you a lot), though I am planning on coming back to it at some point.
Without going into too much details, other things I enjoy about MKX:
1. Fighting gameplay that is tons of fun and has longevity and depth. Variations system is a great way to make characters more interesting to play as and to give players more gameplay options. I mean, playing as Thunder God Raiden is very different from Master of Storms or Displacer.
2. Graphics are beautiful and the most MK1-like out of any other game in the francise.
3. Animations are fluid and many of the martial arts moves look more authentic than they have in quite a few games. Some character (such as Raiden) even have some of their MK1 animations, which for was a very nice touch.
4. Story mode is interesting and fun to watch and play.
5. Plenty of offline content for single player mode. Living towers are Krypt are lots of fun.
6. Great character bios and endings.
7. Improved online mode with tons of options.
As for weak points, probably my number 1 gripe would be the character roster. The Kombat Kids were annoying and uninteresting. I didn't quite take a liking to any one of them. Takeda was the least bad, but even he had too much of the annoying angsty teenager thing going on. What was even worse though was the overly high number of guest characters. Four is way too many, NRS, way too many. I want to play Mortal Kombat, not Mortal Kombat vs. "Random Horror Movie Characters that WB Owns". I would prefer zero for MK11, thank you very much.
And the second was the stages. They were all very dark. I would have liked at least one that was a bit brighter, maybe like The Courtyard from MK1 (which also made appearances in MKD and MK9).
All in all, MKX was a fun and enjoyable game, with plenty of replayability and depth. I would put it in the Top 5 MK games of all time.