I'd say that you are not at all wrong with that description. I've heard it described as a jack of many trades but master of none in terms of game genre. It's a mashup of several genre, so it can be better to describe the game in terms of it's core appeal rather than all the little additional game mechanics.
The simple matter is that the game is badly made(edit: Mav was just starting to learn to program when he made it) though it has a strange intrigue to it that make people want much more from it. It's by no means the worst game or unplayable, but it was poorly conceived at the start, evolved many times to suit user requests, and did not end on a overall strong point (many systems were never finished or fleshed out). Some of the disjoint quality of parts of the game comes from the evolution process, and some of it comes from me choosing limited sections of the game to polish up.