silently listens in from the corner where he has been playing HOMM3 all month...

I played it as much as H3 when I was a kid. I don't know if I can judge it objectively, but I really do enjoy it a lot to this day, and I enjoy the more 'experimental' components. When I get tired of H2/H3, it's great to spice up the formula. It has some downsides: weaker AI, the town screens and creature models are charmless... standard complaints, I guess you've already heard them all. But as I've gotten into the game early on, I just came to ignore those parts. There's also Equilibris to smooth some things out.

The campaigns that throw walls of text at you also helped me become more fluent in reading English. :D