For me, I just felt that brought on a sense of monotony. The entire sequence could take a good couple of hours. Good game design drives you onwards because you're excited about what's coming next (the same rule applies with good novel writing). I would instead groan to myself and think "ugh, again?".

The story was the redeeming feature throughout this sequence however.

How do you guys feel about the backtracking in games like Super Metroid? I find that going through an area with all this stuff you can see but not reach leaves wonderful mental hooks so when you pass through again with grapple or space jump you get all this additional exploration and get to feel good because you've remembered stuff.

I think Metroid is more akin to the open world games of today. It presented a large world (for the time) and there was a sense of exploration. In a game which is essentially on rails... I don't want to run back to the beginning because there's no goo reason to do so.