Since this came back up last week I've been watching my way through full playthroughs of Homecoming and Downpour to see if they're as bad as I remember.
It's impressive they're somehow worse in many places.
I've been on a rant about them for a while in other chats as I was going through it, but the main issue is that the teams trying to make those Silent Hills didn't really get how Silent Hill worked.
In the case of Downpour it had some cool sequences, but almost nothing to do with Murphy. It was more akin to SH1 or 4 where the player character is mostly experiencing somebody else's SH, but the problem is that Murphy's stuff is WAY more interesting. Spoilers for a trash SH game I guess:
There's SO MUCH there to make a great Silent Hill. But instead they spend a sequence dealing with a guy who got drunk and detailed a train, so you get a haunted house ride. The general enemies related to Murphy are just various types of "regular person". There's a doll enemy that's basically a blow up doll that summons shadows of itself to attack that has NOTHING to do with Murphy. It's a creation of someone else who slept with someone to get something she wanted and feels guilty because it ruined her marriage. And it's a good enemy design. But so out of place. Even the penultimate and final bosses aren't anything to do with Murphy.
Homecoming has the opposite problem. The designs are pretty cool (mainly because they're just ripped from the movie), but it fails as a survival horror game. It has absolutely no subtlety in building tension. The main character is too competent so you can just easily fight enemies without spending resources, rendering them nonthreatening.
Also there's the fact that Masahiro Ito himself hates that Pyramid Head is in the game since that's a specific manifestation of James' guilt and desire for punishment brought about by his memories of Silent Hill and seeing the painting of the old executioner, etc. But at this point PH is just a cool, recognisable design to slap in wherever.
After these I have even less excitement for a new Silent Hill game, and I was already running at basically no hype.