I agree with most of your points about DmC, I'm really hoping it will become the Megaman X of the DMC universe. I really loved 4, well the first half of the game and Bloody palace, but your right, a game needs more than just deep combat to be great these days. Otherwise all we would need is a training dummy and a bunch of cool weapons to practice pulling off combos.
Also as much as I can really hate Capcom sometimes I do applaud it for being one of the very few Japanese developers to actually take risk. They could have given us DMC5 with the same ultra bad anime storyline, same Gothic castle locations, same 4 bosses to fight 88 times and likely some really awesome combat and fans would have eaten it up but then complained that the series was getting way too stale and how Capcom never does anything new. But they went out on a limb and let NT make DmC.