Mist form is actually excellent for getting past certain difficult/frustrating enemies. My description of Marsil's special attack is hardly exaggerated. Its normal attack is firebrand's special attack and its special attack
fills most of the screen with fireballs. (Start at 7:10)
That's not really the same as making ''the whole fricking screen explode'', is it?
The map screen appears and disappears almost instaneously in SoTN, it's much, much faster than messing around in your inventory screen. DoS has flying armor, bone ark, puppet master, and paranoia. PoR has toad morph/owl morph. OoE has magnes, paries, and volaticus.
This become obsolete once you get the uppercut (or double jump) and the bone ark is rarely used (once?). OoE allows 3 sets of souls (I made a mistake earlier) so you only have to set the those 3 souls once.
Even if it's faster to consult the map you have to do so more often.
Dawn has a few areas that you can miss if you don't mind the bad ending, it's not remotely comparable to how much can be missed in SoTN. Everything I mentioned other than olrox's quarters and the underground caverns is quite easy to skip, not hard at all. Dawn has a handful of small things, but it doesn't compare to the amount of secret rooms, items, and other extras in SoTN (Dawn doesn't even have any real secret rooms). There are a lot of things that were clearly put into SoTN just because they could (see: Outer Wall elevator).
Look, you have a map. If you find it hard to spot clearly marked unexplored areas, that's your problem and not something the average gamer would have trouble with.
Um, Dawn most definitely has secret rooms. There's even a soul dedicated to making it easier to find them.
It would be a pain to go and count everything but as far as weapons go (the most important thing as far as I'm concerned), Symphony has ~90 and Dawn has ~70 +~65 attack souls for a total of 135 (I wasn't precise so the numbers aren't exact).
Regarding the extras, Dawn is still king with it's Julius mode. Symphony doesn't even have a boss rush mode.
Name me the ways that MoF isn't like classicvania games outside of the maps you can backtrack through and the ability to hang from ledges (which itself is similar to Grant's abilities in CV3). There aren't many.
Pointless cutscenes interrupting gameplay every few minutes (I'm not stupid, I can figure out which gate was
just opened), boss fights being interrupted by hints on how to defeat bosses, QTEs to open chests, regular enemies taking forever to kill. I only played the demo, so I don't know how the game fares, but I would never in a million years compare what I played to the classic Castlevania. Those are carefully designed games that put a lot of emphasis on platforming and enemy placement and not on damage sponges and hand holding.