When Abe drops done one level from a walk in AO/AE he goes forward one or two grid spaces - I'm pretty sure most platforms are high enough that you go two but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. From a run you usually - if not always - go three.
Now imagine that in NNT movement. How far forward do you go? I'm guessing it was too frustrating and "loose" without the grid, so they had him go straight down. It kills your momentum, I agree, but I think it was a deliberate decision.
So now let's get to the real problem with the NNT fall - Abe's over the top panic hands falling stance. In AO/AE he kind of naturally lifts his arms as he drops. From a run he hardly gets them up unless you fall more than a screen. In NNT they instantly snap up. It's talked about again and again how the fast animations hurt NNT, but this is a really fantastic example.
I think the awkward feel of the drop comes from a combination of the loss of horizontal momentum combined with a sudden animation change, really. But a better animation could better convey to the player what is going on, and that would go a long way to smoothing it out.
And Shade AO and AE aren't designed to be fluid and smooth. There are no technical limitations - I don't get why everyone jumps to this. This is PS1 era, slick and fast platformers were everywhere really. AO/AE was a grid based game. At it's core you have to stand in the right grid space at the right time, to make the right interaction. The game deliberately has weight and pause. These animation-bound cinematic platformers is actually a genre, albeit one that's fallen out of favor. If anything it's built to be some kind of anti-game for the time, even down to the design of Abe as the weak scrawny protagonist without a weapon.
The staircase example is weird. I mean in most games you have some kind of momentum when you fall off of things. I'm pretty sure AO/AE falls make a nice curve too. So I guess it's more like going down an imaginary slide? But that's how things actually fall. If you roll a ball off of your desk it doesn't just jank to a stop horizontally to fall straight down.
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