Currently, I'm on a mission to watch all Digimon seasons, and so far I've had basically nothing but good experiences with them. Appmon was eehhhh but the first half was great, Frontier and 01 were really fun, 02 is one of the best shows I've watched in my life and Ghost Game might be my favorite anime period. But notice that I said "basically" there, this is because there's one exception to this, one gigantic exception: Tamers
Tamers is terrible, I don't know how else to put it, every time I try to find something good about the show I remember another 50 things it did wrong, it has a lot of ideas but none of them are good and even the good ones are executed poorly, I want to believe most Tamers fans are more fans of the idea of Tamers than Tamers itself because I just cannot understand how this season is THE Digimon season. So, let me try to ennumerate my problems with it

The nature of monsters as data, and completely forgetting what your point about that was
One thing that Digimon has on and off tried to take advantage of is the existential horror that comes with being a Digimon, after all, Digital Monsters are just data, does data have a soul? If it can be recreated and copied just like that, or just created like with Guilmon (interesting plot line which was never addressed again), what value does that give to digital life? These are all question Tamers constantly asks, but never once dwells into or tries to find an answer to, this and many other issues with Tamers can be attributed to...

Tinfoil hat ADHD
Konaka is a writer that works best at tying up an ending (Big O), or when he doesn't have enough time to rant (GR: Giant Robo), when given too much time like with Tamers he just cannot focus for a second. Tamers sometimes tries to dwell on the nature of digimon, oh but now we gotta focus on the crazy conspiracies of Digimon CIA, oh but wait now the Digital gods are fighting us, but wait no uhhh the D-reaper awoke, wait but now we gotta uhhh uhhhh and so on and so forth. I can't even say it has an identity problem because you could make all these ideas work if you actually tied them up together instead of trying to juggle them and fumbling, now instead of a few ideas strung together or 1 really good idea you got 10 barely developed barely important ideas which I can't be interested in because you gave me no reason to, you got all the bricks but you forgot the concrete. Hey speaking of too many idea...

No time to relax, no time to care
There's a lot of things about Tamers I WANTED to like, but I couldn't, because I was constantly worried that they weren't gonna be important or they were gonna be a fakeout or were never brought up again. The biggest example is those few moments where the show becomes "a kid and his monster", they're really cute and great and I think Tamers would have MASSIVELY benefitted from just focusing on the small things like that a bit more (Slice of Life and "filler" are the life essence of any show, without them it's impossible to care about anything since you never get a chance to wind down), besides, it's kinda hard to relax and just enjoy Guilmon do his thing when the show constantly hints at the Digimon being in a neverending natural selection battle royale, or that Guilmon will disappear because he was created out of thin air or etc, it just feels like the show is constantly baiting or constantly waiting for you to lower your guard, and once that feeling sets in then I'm already surrendered and waiting for the punch. Thankfully, but mostly insultingly, this never happens as Tamers gets distracted by a butterfly fluttering nearby

Computers don't work like that
So much of Tamers is dedicated to talking about how the Digimon came to be, about the computer revolution, the internet, the D-reaper, etc etc. Big problem tho: Everything Tamers says is complete deranged technobabble. It feels like Konaka was way too afraid to touch a computer to actually learn how they worked before working on Tamers and just guessed, and if he was right on anything it was by complete coincidence, you need to be behind 20 layers of subtext to even make sense of the D-reaper. But in the end this is just a minor complaint, what I think is by FAR the biggest problem of the show is...

Top 10 Worst Juri Torture Porns
I'll mostly be talking about Juri, but rest assured no one in this fucking anime is treated right. I can't name a thing the main characters did, let alone the secondaries, that goth girl showed up just to sacrifice her digimon for a power up, the little fuckling with the evolution symbol on his head was there too, and Impmon is just a discount Blackwargreymon. But Juri and by extension Leomon are almost insulting in how bad they are
Leomon shows up and does nothing, he interacts with Juri a few times just to build and excuse of a character dynamic and die. Leomon's sudden death (which was anyways spoiled by the episode card) is the catalyst for Tamers big villain moment, from this point on Juri is nothing more than an object, a tool to look creepy and move the D-reaper from here to there. Tamers just picked a character by roulette and went "yup, make her suffer", I'm not sure how else to articulate this as I was already sick of the show by the time this became a thing but I can assure you that while watching the show I couldn't stop thinking about how shitty this character in particular was treated

In conclusion
Just go watch Giant Robo (2007), same writer, a lot shorter, has the same appeal as Tamers, does not waste your time and actually feels like its trying to make a point instead of juggling 30. Whoever told you 02 was the bad season lied to you