We’d had Star Trek for two years by that point. It really was not that groundbreaking.

Star Wars came out 9 years after 2001. The visuals absolutely were groundbreaking – they still hold up, and look better than all but a handful of space movies that came out before about the 90s.

Your point with the pacing is fair, but I think about half that is an artifact of the time or a byproduct of watching it on a couch with a smartphone instead of in a theater.