MoriartyL,
My first reply was not really well thought-out, so I'd like to make things clearer. There are, I believe, three things that can be enjoyed in adventure games, as they now stand.
1) Puzzles. Those can be mechanical puzzles, conversation puzzles, etc., but they're often inventory puzzles, and that's precisely what you have a problem with, obviously. Yes, they're a convention, they're artificial, they require you to think of people as objects. Some people call them 'logical', but the truth is that they're only logical within the accepted rules of the genre; it's no more realistic or logical to move in a city by rolling dice and being able to buy a street when your movement ends on it, but Monopoly players accept it and enjoy it. There's an old
editorial that very well pointed-out how artificial all of this was. The writer builds his argument on one puzzle in GK3; it's a bad choice, as that puzzle is not at all typical of GK3's gameplay. But he has a point, nevertheless. Some people, for some weird reasons, may enjoy inventory puzzles; but it's not surprising that they appear completely obscure to most people.
2) Exploration. And, by that, I didn't only mean Myst-like exploration. I meant the possibility to take the time to learn lots of useless things about the places, the characters, little pieces of story irrelevant to the main plot. I meant the ability to read every book on a shelf, to rummage through attics, to explore all conversation options. This is something you can't get in a movie or a book, and is for much of the appeal of adventure games. It's the reason why so see so many people complaining that Syberia felt so empty: because it didn't let you explore the screens, look at useless items and people. If that's not something you enjoyed in GK, but actually strongly disliked, then I can't do anything for you.
3) Stories. But, as I said, they're usually inferior to what has been done, and is done daily, in other story-telling forms. They're nice as candy wrapper, but that's about it. Indeed, there's nothing revolutionary about making a good story; but it's a complicated endeavour nonetheless. The fact that so many adventure game designers (Ron Gilbert, Jane Jensen, Chris Jones, Tim Schaffer...) were originally programmers instead of writers certainly didn't help.
What could you play, then? Well, games without inventory puzzles, to begin with. That is, Myst-like games. Obsidian is possibly the best of that kind.
If you want to see story used in a more interactive way, there's The Pandora Directive, about which I've already written much. But it certainly has its share of inventory puzzles.
And then there's The Last Express. Very good story, superior characterization, almost not inventory puzzles (amost no puzzles, even). The game is all about exploration, discovering more about the characters and the story. Maybe you'll like it. But it's a completely unique game, so don't hope to find another one like it.
