The Nintendo Switch is showing its age, and its weaknesses.

Nintendo’s big announcements yesterday were enough to get any avid gamer excited. There’s a new Zelda game coming out in 2023. Pikmin 4 is happening. Fire Emblem: Engage means more delightful tactical fantasy combat is in the works. And another pack of Mario Kart 8 tracks mean we can all spend more time playing one of the best kart-racers ever released.

And yet . . . I remain a bit glum about the Nintendo Switch itself. It’s been wildly successful for Nintendo, and I’ve enjoyed many Switch games, but I’ve also realized that it’s the gaming system I play the least. Even my kids rarely play it, preferring to stick with the PS5, Xbox Series X|S and (in my son’s case) gaming PC.

There are two big reasons for this—two big problems that hold the Switch back from greatness, and from taking up a larger share of our gaming time. (To be fair, if we were big mobile gamers we might play our Switches more, and they do get more use when traveling. That aside, these problems exist regardless of our personal gaming habits).

Joy-Con controllers drift way too much.

I actually have two problems—let’s call them sub-problems—with the Switch’s Joy-Con controllers. My first problem is more subjective:

I dislike how small they are and that goes double for using them individually, as you do in games like Mario Kart 8 when playing local multiplayer (unless you have enough to use them in pairs or have the far superior Nintendo Pro gamepad).

Fine, whatever, I have larger hands than many so naturally these will seem small to me. At least when the Switch is docked I can always just use the Pro controller, which is perfectly fine in every way—a superior and much more traditional gamepad.

The second problem is objective and much worse: Joy-Con drift is what happens when the joysticks go wonky and start “moving” without moving. So you’ll turn on the console and when you try to select a game, the drift moves the ‘cursor’ down (or right or left or whichever way it’s drifting) so that you can’t select what you want.

This also impacts gameplay. You’ll be going one way but let off the joystick and you suddenly start moving the other—off the road or a cliff or into a wall. It’s annoying but more than just an irritation. It makes playing games a lot less fun. It ruins the experience, quite frankly, and even if you get new Joy-Cons or get yours fixed, the drift often is present or comes back. This all by itself is enough to sour me on the entire Switch gaming experience.

One thing that really held The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild back was the fact that Nintendo developed and released it across both the Nintendo Switch and the lower-powered Wii U. If more time had gone into just releasing it on the Switch, the game would have played better, looked better and so forth. This is why it’s great that its sequel, Tears Of The Kingdom, is only coming out on the Switch.

But here’s my problem with that: The Nintendo Switch itself is woefully underpowered. I realize that Nintendo has never really prioritized horsepower and speed and graphics the way that Xbox and PlayStation have, but still: There are some games I’ve played on Switch that just don’t play well, even docked and using a Pro controller. Framerates in games like Fortnite are lower than on competing machines, creating an instant disadvantage in multiplayer.

This is why it’s so disappointing that there’s been no word of a Nintendo Switch Pro or a dedicated console version of the Switch that has much beefier parts, allowing non-mobile gamers to just hook it up to their TVs and never dock and undock it. As good as Tears Of The Kingdom looks, I sure would love to see this game play on a system as powerful as the PS5, Xbox Series X|S or my gaming computer.

That’s also not just because I like pretty graphics. I also like smooth frame-rates and speedy load-times, and the Switch has provided neither.

These are issues that simply aren’t going anywhere until we get a new console, and as popular as the Switch is, that probably won’t be for a good long time. Which is a shame.