That's a fair enough way to judge your average shooter - have a wander round for an hour and see what you think. But that approach is never going to work in a game with RPG elements such as Stalker. It's a given in that kind of game that when you start out all your equipment will be dreadful, you'll be restricted in where you can go and and you won't see a 10th of what the game has to offer in the first couple of hours wandering about.
You're perfectly entitled to your opinion, but for people that have never played it i would strongly suggest that you give it more of a chance than this, because those that have actually completed it tend to rate it very highly. It's certainly in my top 5 games of all time.
Agree with you completely on the bugs by the way - both this and Clear Sky were a complete mess on release. But thankfully have been well supported since and numerous patches have fixed the vast majority of problems.
RPG elements, if by flawed and useless ones yes it has them.
The enemies barely scale, while your character goes from useless twit with guns that defy logic in their ability to shoot in a cone and inaccurately for no reason. The second you get past arguably the best fight in the game at the scrapyard you get guns that defy the previous game logic and every gun from then on is super accurate and can headshot anyone at any range. This isn't RPG, there was no adding to your weapon skill, or increased skill via usage of weapons. Its simply woefully inept weapons designed that way to make the game overly tough at first, and fairly accurate but far to power weapons in an instant. I'd take accurate weapons, as in realistic weapons any day, but the second you get one enemies become ridiculously easy to kill and the game offers no difficulty there on in, at all.
The AI sucks, the best couple of fights in the game, scrapyard(2 fights) are HEAVILY scripted and are incredibly real feeling and great fun due to it, most of the rest of the game is crap barely roaming idiots who simply stand behind the nearest object and fail to remotely get close to harming you.
This is before you add in the being able to be almost invunerable with artifacts/armour about 90minutes into the game(if you suck) which also makes the RPG scaling crap, generally as you get tougher, get better weapons and armour, enemies should scale, but they really don't.
Its a very very close to a great game with some basic and simple to fix design flaws. Yet another example of a game that wildly overreached in ambition and as such ran out of money, time and had to cut 2/3rds of the game, mess with the story, kill the ending, rip out 90% of the RPG-ness and left a crippled game VERY close to being great, but not at all good in the shipping version. Atmospheric, great design of the world, but painfully easy, fairly short, utterly pointless sidequests.
I can't even bring myself to illegally download Clear Skies, thats how bad the first one turned out, yes, I can't be bothered to play a stolen game as the first was so bad, not a good sign
EDIT:_ I bought the stupid fancy tin edition of the first one, what a waste,