I guess for the same reasons why you didn’t care for it, I liked it. Sometimes I feel like people try to reinvent the wheel when it don’t need to be. I like a cliche Western and I’ve seen a billion of the films from way back when where the plot is basically the same just different actors but I love them all.
I knew where the story was going too, not just because I’d been conscious and aware of Red Dead Redemption since my friend was the one who told me to get 2 since it was on PC but for the reasons above as well, but I didn’t mind much. The characters are well voiced and written IMO. And I think the game is pretty fun even if you strip the story away.
As for a third game, I concur with the sentiment about doing it in the birth of the West. I think you’d have to tie it in somehow to the other two, or else I think they should just make that one its own thing. I suppose in my mind I’d have it set with Arthur’s father and end with him getting shot to ribbons like how it’s alluded to in 2, and the epilogue (since both 1 and 2 have this) is a young Arthur and the start of the Van Der Linde Gang. I think setting it with the early days of the Van Der Linde Gang wouldn’t work thematically. The story’s are about redemption and all that (it’s in the name) and i don’t know what kind of redemption outlaws at the height of their career are going to get. Besides I don’t want to see the Blackwater Massacre. The event works best as a “tell, don’t show” in my opinion. Everyone seems to remember it differently or at least it was so chaotic no one really knows what happened. If you show what “really” happened it removes the mystique.