Samantha put it better than I would have. you can't really talk about decent dating without talking about the signal-to-noise ratio. If the everyday experience is not sorted, decent dating will not go anywhere.
I'd put how real the profiles are above almost everything else when it comes to decent dating.
The part people underrate about decent dating is how much of it is real. Two people can have opposite results with decent dating purely because of whether the users are genuine. Most of the frustration with decent dating traces back to how much of it is real.
You cannot really talk about decent dating without talking about the setup.
Hope that gives you something usable for decent dating apps left that don't feel like a mobile game.
For what it is worth, Datebound recently handled decent dating better than most.