To me, it was a very interesting time. For example, that's the period of time in which we built the most beautiful and livable town squares in the world. Even today, when you go to Europe to visit a city, the city square was probably designed in the middle ages (Paris being a notable exception) and the "old city" dating back to the middle ages, is more beautiful than the newer stuff around it. It was a period of beauty in urban design.
Also, the patterns of Feudalism were incredibly stable, compared to previous economic models, so a lot of the rich cultural traditions that were necessary to catapult Europe forward in the Enlightenment were rooted in the middle ages, and wouldn't have existed without Feudalism. If you tried to skip Feudalism and go straight into the 17th Century, Europe would have turned into a horror show -- just think of the French Revolution reign of terror, but assume it just never ends, because at the reciprocal commitments that became established in the middle ages tempered the radicalism of the enlightenment.
And although the pace of learning wasn't as fast as before, there were huge advances made in architecture and construction, culminating with the beautiful Gothic Cathedrals that are still wonders today, and survive today. How many buildings built today will stand for 800 years in the same splendor as the Cathedrals built in the middle ages?
It was also a time of great flowering of crafts and craftsmen, working in guilds scattered across small city-states and distributed political organizations. Distribution, rather than centralization, was the mantra.
For a more nuanced view especially of the cult of crafts, I recommend reading John Ruskin's essay "On the Nature of the Gothic" from his series "The Stones of Venice"