The Elite 4 in these games generally just came across as a slightly modified version of Elite 4 members of previous games. It was a bit half-hearted, and they perhaps weren't sure how many people would get there if they wanted to, or play these games generally.
By this point, the Ghost and Dark-types of the Elite 4 tended to go down quite quickly, as they're mostly quite generic and tend to be vulnerable to straightforward attacks if necessary. Generally, if they chose something else to start with Ghost and Dark types, rather than the Elite 4, it might have been interesting, in lieu of that it was mostly just a bunch of fairly uninteresting Pokémon to be blasted past. Glacia was kind of nice, in that they actually relied mostly on Ice-types, but they were still quite fragile, especially against Swampert and so on. Drake was there, I guess, but more Dragon Elite 4 members by this point was getting a bit forgettable, so it was mostly just a bit of a race through their Pokémon to reach Steven, who mostly relied on their Metagross. Steven was a slightly useful Elite 4 member, because the Steel-type is a bit formidable, at least in appearance, and as such being able to get past it fairly easily in one way or another is quite nice, but at the same time it was interesting that it was effectively treated as a new type.
As a character, though, they were a bit of a repeat of Lance, like most future Elite 4 champions would be, and in this sense generally a bit of a step down from Blue. They did have quite a few filler Pokémon, and their general Water - especially along with Ice-type attacks - and Ground weaknesses were a bit underwhelming, while their design was a bit straightforward and slightly similar to Giovanni's from earlier, but nonetheless they were one of the only ones from that Elite 4 not to just allow for being brushed aside easily. Still, though, that whole Elite 4 were a bit straightforward for most usual types, and were mostly just a question of two teams throwing attacks at each other, so in that sense not really the high point of the game.
