I played DKC 1 so much back in the day, I beat the fastest 100% finish record in Nintendo Power magazine. Like most great platformers, it starts to really shine once you approach it for speed and completion. I just got DKC 2 last year, in fact, and I'm definitely impressed with it, although I haven't learned it much yet. DKC 3...played it, could live without it.
IMO what would suffer the most in a DKC port would be the . The different effects on the two layers really makes them stand out, and they'd be pretty boring as one. would be hard to do justice, and just wouldn't look as nice. Of course, is also out of the question.
The SNES's trump card was its graphics processor, and DKC used the hell out of it. It fun to imagine a port now, but if the two had come out side-by-side back in the day, the TG-16 version would have looked like the poor-man's version.