I do not really know what the general consensus is, but I can share my personal gripes with it; maybe some others may agree, maybe not.
As you already stated, they do feel a bit more needy. I am going to expand upon this a bit and say that I did not like how difficult it was to come across money before they hit adulthood. It made taking perfect care of teens very difficult, since the "baby food" will not satiate them entirely. It really bothers me when I cannot do that. Aside from this, I also found the buttons to be very bad and unresponsive. It made playing games very frustrating, and in turn it makes raising your tama's musical skills very difficult. As such, it becomes tedious to get a good record deal and as such a decent income. The jobs your tama can work when they fail to get a record deal I also personally found a bit annoying to play, especially for the low pay. Honestly, it is largely the faulty buttons that ruin it for me, and I have heard from a couple others that this is not an isolated issue.
The main gimmick seems like a decent concept, but a lot of it was not executed all too well in my opinion. I feel like this is often the case with tamas exclusively released outside of Japan.