Other annoyances:

Spraying away paint is boring. While you spray, you're rooted in one place. Also, you have to spray away every bit of it. It's slow paced and time consuming. I guess they were really proud of their technical ability to have paint splotches of any size, shape, or quantity.

It seems like you have to get rid of lots of paint more at the beginning than the end. That's good in some ways (I haven't had to do too much of it lately), but bad in others (again, why start a game in a way that's least likely to grab players' attentions?)

You no longer have the squat jump from Super Mario 64 (unless I've forgotten how to do it in this game). Instead, if you want to do a higher jump, you'll have to do that backflip sommersault jump, which is much more awkward.

As I mentioned, I didn't like a lot of the activities. I might go into more detail on them later.

I just beat a race in the waterfall stage last night. I died on my first try (I didn't know quite where I was going, but still *almost* won) (why losing a race kills you, I don't know), but won on my second (it's supposed to be a swimming race, but if you use your waterpack to hover to some platforms over the water, you can win with a huge margin). And this is one of the later stages in the game. So, some of those tasks are pretty simplistic.

LJ:

We were at a park today, and saw an incredible amount of wildlife. Most notable were the frogs. There was a pond with a layer of algae. At first we couldn't see anything there, but after we caught sight of a frog or two, we knew what they looked like when they were half submerged. We ended up seeing dozens.

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
-Orwell