Clone Hero

definitely one of the best games of all time

Altough the song choices for harder songs can get... weird, and the playstyle for such high level charts are... spammy, I'm pretty confident in calling this the best VSRG

But the charts are the game. Clone Hero is literally stripped down to nothing but pure gameplay. You seem to value the personality of those games which is super valid, but I don't think it's wild at all that people on this site prefer the game with the most content by far.

I honestly think that's just a difference in approach to rhythm games. Someone who will play rhythm games to get good at them and learn it over hundreds or thousands of hours is always gonna prefer the game with endless content and better quality charts over character and personality as those are novelty that will eventually wear off anyway. If you're someone who just plays the game for a few hours and then only plays very occasionally and casually you're likely gonna get more value from the latter.
I don't think either of those approaches is right or wrong.

But, you can also add any custom background videos and highways to all your songs, which allows you to give them those same personalities the GH and RB games have. Want all the GH3 songs to have their original background videos and characters with their highways to match? You can, and that's what I've actually been doing with all the games. It might not be a 1-to-1 recreation, but it looks damn good and feels awesome to play. It's like having a portal to every game's quickplay in one place.