I've been playing it on and off lately (on a real n64 no less) and I honestly think it's more of a level design problem than the actual collect a ton.

I've really enjoyed some levels (the factory level is nice!), while I despised others, such as the water one with a sunken ship. I specially hate when levels over rely on kong changes just to unlock things. They make you do four or five round trips just to hit all switches and pads related to each kong. This just seems lazy...

The factory level is nice because it has plenty of platforming (which in my opinion could use some more!) and they require each Kong platforming abilities to reach different places. That's the king of thing they should have focused more trough out the game. Miyamoto even said that climbing mountains is the thing that inspired SM64 levels, so I wished they had took that to hart in DK64.