For the things that need to die, tutorials that integrate into the story and tutorials that you can skip aren't the only options here, what about a tutorial that's simply not boring to play through? Making the tutorial fun would prevent those issues. I don't remember any "now practice it" parts in Disaster...
I'm not much of a loot person myself, I do like loot but usually loot is just a number boost and I don't care about that, I want game changers. That's what I like about Metroid items (and one of the areas Corruption fell flat in), you get one and suddenly the game is different. EDF weapons tend to be like that too, because they're not random you get what the game devs designed and if it has drawbacks you better learn to deal with those because you can't just keep grinding until a similar weapon without the drawback drops (looking at Boringlands here). Even Hellgate did that better than Boringlands because often the different guns you got had different behaviours (e.g. the fire rocket launcher is nothing like the MIRV).