The dynamic you describe is my experience in approximately 20% of 4 player games, maybe 30% of 2 player games.
Really skilled Race players see a wide variety of paths to victory in my experience, so if someone has a lead on one strategy, you pursue a different strategy and it’s not usually not obvious who will win.
The first one makes everyone rich and causes rents just go back and forth for ages. The second one makes it take much longer to get monopolies on property groups.
The strategy everybody follows is basically "buy everything you can, and decline all bad trades". Buy everything, of course, to prevent others from making full property groups. Since there is no such thing as an equal trade, no trades are made.
As you can imagine, since nobody has full property groups, the game takes forever, it's terribly boring, and pretty much boils down to luck.
This is because if two players complete two monopolies first, they are basically guaranteed to be among the final two at a 4+ person table, as their early monopolies will quickly drain the other two or more players who refuse to make these trades and are therefore wasting time walking around, during which they’ll grow weaker and weaker due to your monopolies.
Knowing this, it almost doesn’t matter if the trade is equal, so long as you’re trading for a post-jail monopoly (pre-jail tends to be low value), because the winner, once you and your opponent have your improvements, will be decided by chance, as one of the two monopolists will bankrupt one of the other, more behind players first, and then take all their money and property, almost certainly netting themselves several more monopolies and funds for improvements.
Somehow a particular set of house rules got popular enough to make everyone hate monopoly. It turns a game of high stakes, high commitment resource scuffling, into a game where you either get knocked out fast or are given enough free assets that you can only lose in the slowest, most agonizing way possible.
It's kind of funny how a game designed to heavily favor aggression to make a point had that entire point negated by house rules.
An interesting read