CV is pretty underrated. Besides the amazing 3-D graphics, I just find the game so eerie, and it is like the other games, in that you play two characters for one epic experience.
I remember when I played the classic trilogy back in the day on the PS1 the graphics blew me away, and then when I played Code Veronica at launch on the Dreamcast I was so stunned at how much better it looked, which is funny because now Code Veronica doesn't look that great lol.
Whilst the jump from Biohazard 3 to Code Veronica was impressive graphically, Shinji Mikami does deserve some criticism for making graphical leaps too fast. The problem with Mikami is that he has a hard time understanding consistency. Instead of waiting for PS2 to release and developing CV with that hardware in mind, he felt the need to rush to Dreamcast and get an RE game out ASAP. The result was lackluster sales and a largely overlooked title.
See, the vast majority of RE fans were on Sony PlayStation, if he would have just been patient and waited just a little while longer, they could have utilized the complete depth of PS2's hardware, released Code Veronica on that platform, and sales would have been many many more times what they were and the series would have continued to thrive on PlayStation with continuous graphical and mechanical improvements, whilst keeping the series roots intact.
Mikami then doubled down and something even more stupid: he decided to make RE GameCube exclusive, and every game released on that platform before 4 did poorly sales wise, which led us to the over the top action thriller that was RE4 which, in the long term, caused much damage to the series and made it almost completely something different than what it was, and has hardly recovered from that till this day.
So yeah, Mikami's business blunders and dumb decisions are directly responsible for the series metamorphosing into something different, there has been some improvements recently, but Mikami being impulsive and sidelining Sony caused lots of long term damage.
Shinji Mikami and Kenichi Iwao could be classified as the 2 prominent founding fathers of Biohazard. I like to make a joke that Iwao made Biohazard and Mikami broke it.