Most of all, the problems we attribute to the genre are not exactly endemic to it. We see similar issues on almost every single adventure, yes, but that’s because of bad puzzle design, not because the genre is somehow doomed for failure.
As you said in another post, one of the larger problems is feedback and we are only now seeing how it can be done properly (Portal). Not only textual or dialog hints, but also the visuals have a huge part on this. We can’t just paint a pretty background and then try to attach a puzzle to it without thinking first what’s the focus of the image. Where do the eyes of the player’s are driven to first. Where are the visual hot-spots, before actually coding them.
Sound also plays a, not as important, role in guiding the player to the correct answer.

Reminds me of a particular puzzle that had me stuck for months. In Monkey island 2, at the end of the game the player was supposed to get a piece of cloth from Le Chuck, but there wasn’t any apparent way to do this. You didn’t have any items that could help you and the scenery seemed to serve no purpose for this puzzle.
Until I somehow discovered that the coin slot on a grog machine was actually interactive.
WHAT? Surely, this doesn’t do…
Yep, a coin falls to the floor. Great, what’s that supposed to do? Then, Le Chuck appears, sees the coin and bends over revealing part of his underwear. Of course now it was clear what I was supposed to do.
It wasn’t an Aha! moment, I wouldn’t have solved that thing if I hadn’t discovered a hot-spot by accident. I didn’t beat the puzzle, I just stumbled into the solution.

You start with 5 tools, end with 7 and those two tools added had to be slowly introduced, otherwise the player’s head would explode. In an adventure game you have 235487 different tools and some with very similar uses. Solving these puzzles becomes more brute force driven than logic driven.

And I get into it more later in a different post, but I don’t think that’s the case. I think people want that to be the simple explanation for “why adventure games suck,” but I believe what’s really happening is that we’re too willing to let impatience get in the way of unconventional thinking.

If you know what you’re doing, it shouldn’t matter whether you have 5 or 25 items in your inventory. I think that expecting a player to have a sudden “a-ha!” epiphany for everything is unrealistic, but at the same time, I think a game where you’re just brute-forcing everything until you find something that works is tedious and frankly, stupid. And both players and developers (myself included) are much to willing to throw up our hands at the thought of having to think of a solution to a problem, as opposed to just executing the solution to a problem.

If an obstacle in a game is brute force-driven instead of logic-driven, that means the obstacle is poorly designed. It doesn’t mean that the genre or the format of the game is poorly designed, any more than my disappointment at sliding-block puzzles and lighting-torch puzzles in “Uncharted” means that action-adventure games are doomed to failure.

It’s always apparent when you can or can’t solve a puzzle. If I can’t get onto that platform it’s not because I didn’t pick up the screwdriver, it’s because I haven’t figured out how I can get up there yet.

That one’s valid. If a game is hiding the tools you need, as opposed to encouraging you to think of new ways to use the tools you have, then it’s badly designed.

My take? Portal’s puzzles are better than the average adeventure game’s puzzle because of two things:
* You have a limited amount of tools, and there are a million and one uses for each. You can jump, move, move objects, create portals and pass through portals. That’s it. There is no tedious work, you don’t have to pixel hunt the screen, you don’t have to pick up objects. You start with 5 tools, end with 7 and those two tools added had to be slowly introduced, otherwise the player’s head would explode. In an adventure game you have 235487 different tools and some with very similar uses. Solving these puzzles becomes more brute force driven than logic driven.
* It’s always apparent when you can or can’t solve a puzzle. If I can’t get onto that platform it’s not because I didn’t pick up the screwdriver, it’s because I haven’t figured out how I can get up there yet.