I'm not quite sure what the metric is for measuring if a game is better than other ones, especially in percentiles, and I have not played Animal Crossing for 3DS yet, so I won't argue with that.
However, based on past experience, although newer iterations of the series are often more feature rich (astronomy, balloons, emoticons, and a new perspective from GCN to DS, higher definition models and textures, as well as the addition of the city from DS to Wii, with more/new fish and bugs each time), I wouldn't necessarily describe them as better.
To me, the appeal of the original title was its simplicity of design. With the top-down perspective and with regions of the map being divided quite clearly into blocks with rules regarding fish and bug spawning in each block, it made it so that play sessions could be extremely methodical, allowing the player to do everything there was to do in the town (and be sure that was the case) within an hour or two of playtime. It made the entire experience very casual, but also very relaxing and made me want to go back in everyday and check on things.
With the addition of new features/extension of old ones in the later games in the series, along with the removal of the well defined squares, it lead me to feel somewhat overwhelmed whenever I started a play session. That little bit extra to worry about stopped the game from being relaxing and turned it into work, at least to me.
This is obviously just my personal opinion as a very logically minded and completionist type of person, and yours may be different.
At any rate, for new fans of the series, I would definitely recommend playing the original in Dolphin on PC for a taste of what it's about. The original Animal Crossing in 1080p looks wonderful, and should run well on most computers as it isn't a very intense game (CPU or GPU-wise), as it was actually originally released as an N64 game in Japan.
