You must be playing the wrong game then.
Leaf Storm: As I remember, exactly one pit in Act 2, which you'd have to make a conscious effort to fall into.
Water Palace: A few...all but one of which you fly over if you're not trying to die.
Night Carnival: A couple of annoying ones, as stated.
Mirage Road: Has a few pits, but none that you need any effort to avoid.
Huge Crisis: No difficult ones I can remember.
Altitude Limit: Lots of pits and instant deaths, but only one or two are cheap, mostly they're understandable since it's a sky level, and the second last one at that. So it's justified in being hard.
Dead Line: I can remember maybe one that could be considered cheap. Even though it's the last level.
And re: the super boost, it's clear you haven't tried TAing at all as there's ALOT more to achieving maximum speed than just using the super boost. Tactical aspect? The necessity of keeping up your tension gauge while not wasting time hanging around performing tricks adds a much greater tactical edge to the game than the spindash ever did. And I don't really see how you can pretend that the dumb speedcaps in the older games were good things. Having to let go of the d-pad coming off a diagonal spring to keep maximum speed etc. is silly. Removing it streamlines the whole game, and was a natural progression.
And I fail to see how the ability to easily go fast in a game with levels and gameplay designed around going fast is bad...unless you just dislike speed (or maybe constant speed is more accurate in this case) in general, but I see no reason a game can't be founded on it. And as for obsoleting the spin attack/spin dash...well, so what? As far as I'm concerned it's just because they've been ceded by something better. Okay, I wouldn't want them to be completely forgotten, but it's not like they ARE totally redundant (certainly not the spin attack, anyway).
For all I'm arguing for them I don't claim Rush/Rush Adventure to be perfect, they certainly have flaws, and in a way I can see what you're saying. Certainly the constant high-speed means it can be really hard to react to anything, and a fair amount of memorisation is required...but you cited level memorisation as one of the good things about the old games. If you just plain don't like it that's fair enough, I can't argue with personal taste. Your reasoning just seems very contradictory and poorly informed to me.
[EDIT] I need to stop editing this post, lol.