I hadn't seen The Lost World or Jurassic Park 3 since I was a kid and, honestly, I seemed to remember my feelings about them (and their reputations) more than the specifics of the films themselves. And my feelings, obviously, weren't good. I remembered Jurassic World being a massive letdown and I'd almost forgotten part 3 entirely. The strongest lingering memory I had about both of them was just what a letdown they were and how much neither I nor anyone else seemed to like them.
After recently rewatching them though, I feel like I was really underappreciating them. Like you say, they're far from perfect, but they were nowhere near as bad as I remembered. And I found them to be quite a lot better than any films in this new trilogy (which came off very formulaic, devoid of character development, tropey, and cartoonishly silly and over-the-top much of the time in a generic blockbuster action movie sorta way).
If other people's feelings are similar to mine when it comes to this, I think a lot of their opinions may just be based on how different our expectations were at the time. Jurassic Park set the bar pretty high for a sequel and, at the time, I think many of us were just expecting too much from them (especially knowing they starred the guys from the original movie). So we didn't really watch them in the context of what they were but, rather, in the context of what they weren't. And that negative view of them just became how we remembered them.
I think for this new trilogy most of us weren't expecting Jurassic Park quality. In fact, we were expecting exactly what we got: an action-packed, dinosaur-filled spectacle that would be fun to watch on a big screen. We weren't expecting depth, we weren't expecting great characters, and since the story mostly wasn't about the original characters or plot, the movie was sorta free from having to live up to that and to be seen as its own thing.
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