My first was P3P. As cool as P3 was, I liked P4 and P5 a lot more. Granted, the latter two definitely felt less like a SMT game in terms of tone, setup, and style... but after trying several mainline SMT games I'm not really sure I like the full tilt SMT style.
I know P3P took away a number of things that likely helped give the game its charm, like the 3D environments and scenes, but there's no way in hell I'd want to play a tougher game without control of my party members. That doesn't sound remotely fun.
Ah yes, randomly having your dungeon crawling plans thrown out the window cause the game decided to make one of your party members less useful... a true critical darling of difficulty. /s
I agree with you here though, for the most part at least. I was thankful P5R giving you infinite ammo to work with. While I appreciate what the original game was trying to do, it made guns way less useful than they should've been considering their damage output and accuracy, to the point I didn't really give them much consideration in dungeon dives. Being able to actually use the things was, in my eyes, more enjoyable. Buuuuuuut as I type this... I think back to the original game's way it did things and think it could've just used some buffs in P5R rather than a wide sweep overhaul like it got.
The weird enemies that were going haywire and would nuke the others off the screen if you managed to deal with the angry one was dumb though. It was very rare I ever had issue taking them out right away so it made some fights rather trivial