Wizardry 8 and TOEE are good examples of almost- good games
What's better than Wizardry 8?
Name 3 better blobbers and make us laugh.
I don't like blobbers, but as far as I know, Wizardry 8 IS the best blobber. I especially liked how you could move your formation around during battle.
However, it is still true that Wizardry 8 is slow and bloated with tedious random encounters, some of which take 15+ minutes to play out, either because of crowd control and slow animations or because of "friendly" NPCs and weird pathing issues.
Most long time fans recommend playing Wizardry 8 with a speed patch and there are also some recommended mods that (I believe) try to address some of the problems with abnormally slow random encounters, by tweaking animations, pathing issues, enemy stats, friendly NPCs, etc.
So the Wizardry 8 fan community basically agrees with my assessment that Wizardry 8 would benefit from an experienced player going through and cleaning up some of the annoying aspects.
ToEE is a similar story, yes it has a good combat engine with some good fights, but that combat is semi-locked behind hours and hours of Hommlett, which is not fun at all. It also suffers from boring encounter design in a lot of places. It was a mistake to translate the P&P module into a video game too literally, the DM is supposed to adjust things to keep it fun.
An experienced player with a good understanding of level / encounter design and a basic set of design tools could DRAMATICALLY improve TOEE, in fact the community used to recommend the use of the Circle of Eight patch to help with some of these issues, however I'm not sure if it is still recommended, since it started to get bloated.
(Which is another issue; mods can and do improve aspects of these games, but mods tend to introduce their new own problems at the same time.)