[HappyHamster]

What? No.. that really shouldn't have been the case...
Look, the game was (to my understanding) made to be a more fast paced, action packed platformer to compete with the other platformer games out there. Most notably Mario. But up until after Sonic Adventure was released, it was never soley about going right as fast as you can and jump over the one or two enemies in your way. I mean, look at Sonic 1. A few examples would probably have to be Labrynth Zone (including the third part of Scrap Brain) where you had to go left for a decent chunk of the level too. There were never speed boosts on the ground, and you didn't get 'rewarded' for doing cheap little tricks while you ran as fast as you could through an entire level. Same thing goes for Sonic 2 up to Knuckles.
From what I've seen, the whole trend of making Sonic more about running fast (speed) over anything else happened during the Adventure series and it just stuck.