My problem with this story is that Holmes doesn't really solve anything. The criminals get away, and Holmes is totally ineffective in stopping them.

Yeah...a lot of loose ends add up to an unsatisfying reading experience.

Besides which, a couple of logical absurdities (courtesy the Annotated Sherlock Holmes) that don't help the cause much:

Holmes displays a shaky grasp of physics in deducing that Hatherly's lantern, by being 'crushed' in the wooden press, started the fire. In reality, the fire would have had no fuel (air) to sustain it and would have been extinguished almost instantly.

Who put the cap back on Hatherly's head? Internal evidence says it must have been whoever carried him out of the grounds...but why would they bother?

There's a few other early stories in which Holmes, despite his deduction, is unable to catch the criminals and save the lives of victims, such as "The Five Orange Pips" and "The Greek Interpreter". It seems reasonable to suppose that Doyle wanted to give his character some falibility, and also wanted some realism in his stories in that they didn't always have totally happy endings.

Possible...although I don't completely buy the realism thing coming from the author of The Lost World et al. :)

There's a handful of other stories in which Holmes comes off looking less than perfect. In addition to the aforementioned "Orange Pips" and "Greek Interpreter", he is also unable to prevent the deaths of Hilton Cubbitt in "Dancing Men" and John Douglas in "Valley of Fear" from crime organizations, despite his brilliant deductive work in those escapades. He and Watson's attempt to burglarize the home of "Charles Augustus Milverton" hits a snag when they blunder in on Milverton's own murder. In "The Missing Three Quarter" Holmes fails to locate Godfrey Staunton in time for the Rugby meet. In "Veiled Lodger" a dying woman confesses to the truth of a case Holmes investigated years ago, one he failed to learn the truth behind. And of course, there's his most famous "failure", being outwitted by Irene Adler in "Scandal in Bohemia" . . .

Interestingly enough, Colin Watson in Snobbery With Violence makes the same point about Hercule Poirot - that his creator deliberately had him 'blunder' occasionally.
Watson's argument was that Christie wanted to make sure Poirot's public didn't turn against him for being 'over-clever'.It makes sense that Doyle would have the same concerns about Holmes.

But this story is unsatisfying for other reasons. not only does Homes not catch the bad guys, we never even learn their identities or their crime! And when Hatherly quite sensibly complains about this state of affairs, Holmes basically tells him just to chalk it up to experience...in short, a completely frustrating situation for a mystery lover.