I've probably said it before but for me the deal breakers were non-linear mazes - those ones where moving east from A to B and then moving west from B didn't necessarily take you back to A. I found those exasperating, in fact, encountering a non-linear maze in a game was sometimes enough to stop me from playing it. I played these sorts of games to be entertained, not to be annoyed.
Probably the only non-linear maze I was able to tolerate was the one in Monkey Island 1 where you just went around in circles until you had managed, by more logical means, to procure the treasure map. That did make logical sense. Maybe someone should have had the brainwave of doing the same thing in the earlier purely text based games, so that when you located the "map" object, all the directions in 'the maze' reverted to being logical and consistent. That way you could hold the player up for a little while but then allow them to proceed more easily later.
The other thing I absolutely hated was sudden death in either text or graphic adventures, and - Sierra, I'm looking at you. You could get yourself killed for the crime of merely moving west or opening a door.
LucasArts never, ever did that to you. There was one memorable scenario in the original Monkey Island where you could die, but you had 10 minutes to try to escape, and even if you couldn't manage it within that time they managed to make Guybrush's death scene hilarious so you didn't really mind that you had been killed.
If there were times when I had to cheat it was often because the game just didn't anticipate the number of ways different players might try to express or attempt to state the action, so you'd try something and it wouldn't work and you go off on a long wild goose chase only to find that what you were trying to do in the first place was the right idea after all - you just hadn't chosen the right words / right input, as expected by the game.
There was some terrific humour in those old games, I remember in one of the Infocom 'Planetfall' games there was a spartan looking chapel with only two items of note, a star and an eternal flame, the symbols of the galactic religion. In the room next door there was a switch which could be turned on or off - it took me some time to work out that it was the on-off switch for the eternal flame...
One particularly good puzzle I remember from the Enchanter / Sorcerer / Spellbreaker series is a scene where a (Royal?) family had been turned into 'Angles' - inert angular objects. Among the items available were some 'Untangling Cream' and elsewhere a 'Tee Remover'. You had to use the 'Tee Remover' on the 'Untangling Cream to make it into 'Unangling Cream' and then apply it to the stricken family. A brilliant pun, but did anyone honestly ever manage to solve that problem themselves? (I didn't).
Text adventures are usually thought of as a solo activity, man against game, but actually I can remember quite a few times when a group of us sat around trying to brainstorm our way through a text game, with the person sat at the keyboard usually being the best / fastest typist.