So I never actually paid attention to high-level Turtles In Time arcade play before.
Yeesh, the rank is obscene! By the fifth stage, the game becomes the beatemup equivalent of Gradius III's arcade version.
There are just so many foot soldiers, and they're all using different weapons. Due to the way everything comes together, there's little the player can actually do aside from the safest possible moves. Even if you take the SNES version out of the equation, the arcade game has problems. I can point to any other Konami beatemup that shows far more restraint than Turtles in Time arcade game, including titles that came afterwards.
The game also looks rushed, at least more-so than its prequel. The backgrounds are mostly flat and uninteresting, with very little in the way of details. Shredder's appearance at the end of Sewer Surfin' doesn't make any sense. The randomness of the grabs & throws is also really off-putting. Then again, I guess if grab & slams were practically guaranteed as they are in Turtles in Time SNES, they'd trivialize the difficulty, but...oh well. Also the bosses are too easily stunned. Even the first Turtles Arcade game had the sense to code some hard-counters in after "x" number of hits (like when Rocksteady would kick after every hit, or Bebop after 2-3).
-when you grab a pizza in the arcade version, your character strikes a pose and stop moving for a second. i know it sounds petty written like that, but considering the more numerous and agressive enemies, it can be annoying.
I think you get several invulnerability frames during and after the pose at least.
EDIT: I take that back. You're invulnerable during the pose, but you can get hit immediately after the pose ends. This freakin' game.