I have no doubt that there's story substance to them, I just have a problem with style, delivery and presentation (which I value just as much, if not more). As for datalogs, I'm thinking of how they're done in Tactics Ogre. You don't always get to play out things that happen in the world around you, but you can watch scenes happening somewhere else, or read about them as they occur, and that to me still feels more elegant and tasteful than being given an arbitrary chore to do that allows you to encounter them along the way.
I dunno, it feels cleaner, more minimal, less needless excess.
I also have this feeling of..... everything just feels like more organic storytelling to merely watch these things unfold, separate from you (in a "meanwhile, in ___" way), rather than coincidentally inject yourself into the center of every situation artificially in order to obtain that context. Really good data-logs can have that effect on me as well, and I can appreciate that more sometimes.
Also, it's not the chore of it that bothers me (sometimes I even feel like the more tedious/obtuse, the cooler and more mysterious a secret is)-- it's the framing of it AS a chore that bothers me.