I did a GameBoy and similarly found the CPU enjoyable and the PPU a huge pain. Perhaps if I understood graphics better, I would have enjoyed it more, but like you say it just felt like a lot of steps.
But the foreground / object sprites have this huge pipeline. IIRC, the PPU determines which sprites to draw in line X + 1 during line X. After that, it has to load the data for each object, etc etc. It was just discouraging. Plus since my frame rate is so low, I have to sit at a blank screen for quite some time waiting for the game to show anything, and longer for the demo to start (I don't have controls)...
Anyhow, glad I'm not alone ;)