Yeah DMC2 is bad but it has a ton of redeeming qualities.
Most of the time people just shit on it because of it's flaws while also ignoring everything it did good and that helped the franchise.
DMC2 brought us the prototype for what we call Styles now and game mechanics, a ton of combos (that no one knows about), one of, if not, the best designs for Dante, some
solid bangers, a ton of world building (like seriously, DMC2 and DMC3/the manga have the most world building out of everything), a ton of lore connections made by other entries in the series (like how BtN states Agnus used to work in Uroboros and he took all that knowledge to Fortuna), Itsuno and Bingo took control of the franchise, Lucia having a full blown story mode (which sadly no other game has done).
Mind you, all of that because Itsuno only had 6 months to direct the game into a playable state since they ONLY had the stinger animation done when he took over.