Nobody Likes Water Levels

For some reason, people simply do not like water levels in games. Why is this? I have a few ideas:

1. "Flying"
I say "flying" in quotation marks because it's not strictly flying... but the idea of having vertical movement in ways other than jumping. It changes how the game is played and it distorts people's perception of how things "should work".

2. Scenery
The scenery in under-water segments are usually rather fixed and without much variation. This isn't always the case, but how often are under-water segments filled with just rocks? I guess it boils down to what actually exists underwater in reality, and putting that into the games

3. Mazes
Due to the "flying" and also due to how under-water scenery is so consistent, the segments can end up being quite maze-like. Especially true in 3D games, it can be very hard to know where you are, where you've been and where you're going.

4. Slowness
Underwater everything goes slower, Sonic games for example suffer from this, even though they do not suffer from the previous points, they are definitely slower. If you're able to play a game at a certain speed without any issues, slowing it down doesn't increase the fun levels, it just takes longer.

5. Time limits
Usually there's some sort of "breathing" that needs to be done, so the time spend under water is time that you're rushing for air. it's not so much that people dislike time limits in general, it's that time limits are less fun when they are mixed with forced slowness (as mentioned in the previous point).

6. Water is scary
Water is scary in general. We live above sea levels, the world as we know it is on land, we are aware of the creatures that roam the lands. But the ocean is where all the mystery lies, it's big, it's dark, and there's a lot of crazy stuff down there we don't know about. We can't breathe there either.

I would say a lot of the general disliking of water levels comes from the disliking of common features of the water levels, not the actual water itself. If we look at games that do not incorporate any of these features, we are not bothered by them (Pokemon for example).