In my experience, you can't put much weight on contemporary reviews. I've been reading a lot of old magazines recently, and they had pretty different ideas of what made a game good back then. Often reviewers (especially from Britain) were obsessed with 'value' and 'challenge' - so really long and really hard games were the 'best' because you would get more hours of play per dollar. Makes some sense in an 80s context, where they'd come from being used to $10 home PC games to $50 console games, but putting that above gameplay and design quality showed they didn't yet appreciate the craft of game design. Often completely broken controls almost get praised because it made the game a 'challenge' - you can see this in a couple of those review pages even - comparing it to the (basically perfect) controls of Mickey Mouse it just doesn't play as well and is frustrating, but is still a 'classic' because it 'offers a challenge'. Today we see that while Double Dragon and Contra are both hard, but only the latter is brilliant, because it's hard but fair.
One hilarious example I remember was Kirby's Adventure getting a bad score because it was too easy. I'm not the biggest fan of the game, but it is at the very least an extremely high quality well crafted game with probably the best graphics of the generation and flawless controls and performance. On the other side of the scale, simple arcade games like Pac Man and Galaga got bad scores in the later 80s because they were so simple compared to Super Mario, but looking back now, they're games you would get much more playtime from because they are tightly designed and infinitely repayable.
Nostalgia is also a helluva drug. Castlevania Adventure on Game Boy is a childhood favourite of mine, I mastered the controls and can one life it. It's 'fair' if you learn all the glitches. But the controls are really somewhat broken, it really is not a fair game, and almost everyone who first played it more than five years after release hates it because of these real issues. You see it quite a lot from a British/EU perspective too. Almost nobody in the rest of the world is interested in checking out Spectrum games from the 80s, because in general they look so clunky. Yet they're 'unmissable classics' in Britain.
I get your point, and I agree that the controls are not... well, I would not use the word 'fair', but maybe 'accessible' or 'comfortable'. And, probably, if I were playing the game today my opinion could be similar to yours. But I like to think that the sensations and the charm of that first era of gaming (MY first era, not THE first era) were right back then - I mean, if I felt in love with Psycho Fox, it was because it hit the nail on the head, at least for me (well, and for some more).
I remember starting the game and saying "Well, one more", and "What the hell??" when I was unable to overcome the first platforms. "It feels like a clunky Mario!!". But then, 20 or 200 lifes after that, it just 'clicked'. And what a satisfying feeling, after that! I still remember the sensation I got: flowing. It was like flowing. Flowing through platforms, flowing through levels. "Now it feels like a clunky Sonic!!" - well, Sonic didn't even exist.
Also, I remember the level design being really good: challenging but fair, and rewarding. But maybe is my memory.
About the Spectrum, I think it's an European thing, not just a British thing. I'm from Spain, and here there still is some Spectrum scene and a lot of love. Amazingly, or not, the MSX gets even more love.