So here’s the two-part question:
What styles / genres / mechanics are largely missing from your collection (or rotation)? Why do you think you don’t you get on with them?
What specific games defy that preference and win you over anyway? Why?
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Modern Euro style is missing from my collection.
Not sure why Rosenberg’s farming games work. I guess it wasn’t a cube conversion game where you exchange a pink and brown cube for a ship. No. You need some wood and flax threads.
Seasons work due to the pretty art style from Libellud and the combotastic card play is fun.
Both Teotihuacan and Tzolkin works because Tzolkin have a very tight and compact ruleset, yet the decisions are not narrow nor shallow. It forces you to plan several moves ahead. Same with Teo, but to a lesser extent. 3 resource types and they are very distinct on their uses. They also offer a good mix of short-term and long-term decision making.
Lacerdas are up there, but not all. I would like to try On Mars more, but concerned that there’s not much depth in this game in the same extent as Splotters like FCM or Indonesia
Another exception is Through the Ages. It’s a bean-counting game, but it is very interesting and difficult game to play.
Oh, I made a Geeklist a while ago. It’s a bit obsolete now, but still works in general
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The Mind. No exceptions 
Serious answer is anything around acting, roleplaying, storytelling. That bit of my brain just doesn’t work and I find it very stressful. A conditional exception is that I have occasionally been persuaded to play Monikers. The condition is that I will only play with a very specific group of people.
Second is probably negotiation. Specifically games that have a negotiation phase that devolves into lots of shouting. The exception to that is Sidereal Confluence. I eventually came to the conclusion that the negotiation there has enough structure/boundaries that I can focus on something specific instead of getting overwhelmed.
My husband’s blank spot is cooperative games, and the exception is Sub Terra 2 for pure co-ops, plus games where he gets to be the traitor.
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I used to work very hard to make sure I had every mechanism, theme, and/or experience well-represented in my collection. I’d say the “weakest” corner would be social deduction (because not only do I not like it, I’m also not good at it; also: my partner strongly dislikes the mechanism, moreso than me).
Over the last couple of years, I’ve learned that I need to focus on “gaming in the present”, which does not involve setting up a table inside of a large, gift-wrapped box. But, rather, focusing on games and gaming that suits my life as it exists today, rather than a theoretical future.
As a result, my focus has been on solo games; whether solo-only or, simply, excellent solo-able games. And all of the other corners of the hobby have marched along in time, but my collection (also due to budgetary constraints) has remained mostly untouched.
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Board games:
I don’t like co-op games. They put me in the same mindspace that I often have in my day job (including any potential traitors 
) and I don’t need more of that in my pastime. The exception would be adventure board games, but even then, I’d rather play an RPG.
I don’t like social deduction games. I can’t tell if people are lying and I’m very bad at it myself. I don’t see the point of Werewolf.
Roleplaying games:
I did a fair amount of “system collecting” back in the day, so I have a wide breadth of games from the 90’s and 00’s. It’s a bit of a curse because now I find little novelty in new games, even indie darlings, since I can see how they relate to games that came before.
I probably have more fantasy and superhero rpgs than any other genre.
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Co-Op
I don’t like it as the game feels like a solvable puzzle to me. ‘We have a traitor!’ is also a very lazy way to fix it. IMO.
Lacerda/Turzci/Wherle
All of these fall into the complexity for complexities sake. Feels very ‘we have found a problem to solve if we will add a rule’.
See also most games deemed 3.5 and above complexity.
The whole wargaming subgenre
See above, but this probably has some historical reason.
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I’m not a fan of superheroes, but I like Sentinels of the Multiverse.
I’m not a fan of fantasy but I like Aeon’s End. (OK it’s not generic fantasy in the sense of elves and dragons and stuff.)
The exception I’d personally make to that is Imperium * (i.e. Classics, Legends, Horizons) because while it’s complex it’s very regular: you mostly don’t have to remember special cases, this thing here works just like all the other things of the same general class. (Pity about the rules, though the Horizons book is better than the original.)
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Like @pillbox I once strove for a collection having something of everything.
Turns out I don‘t exactly like „everything“. There are mechanisms and themes that I just don‘t enjoy. I may have mentioned some of these before. And it is unlikely that my collection will get more of these anytime soon:
- Real-time. Including anything speed-matching like Set. Jungle Speed is a horror game for me. The only real-time games that survive in my collection are those where the element is optional. The only game I ever truly enjoyed that had a non-optional real-time element was Galaxy Trucker and we never played that all that much (and then I overplayed it on the app)
- Hidden Movement Games. This may be more of a function of nobody else wanting to play them. I don‘t feel like I actually dislike it but I also don‘t particularly enjoy it.
- Bluffing games. This is a huge conundrum because apparently I am good at reading people. At least I can see right through my partner every time. But while I will play Liar‘s Dice… I‘ll never propose it. Or Cockroach Poker. Bluffing stresses me out. That‘s not a Hat seems to be an exception because it has the memory component that creates the chaos and it‘s less about actually lying about something you know is wrong but pretending to remember correctly.
- Campaign games are a weird. I still like Gloomy + Frosty (neither of which have been on the table in over a year) and I have quite a few others BUT… I vastly prefer one-off games these days. I can stomach short campaigns but I‘ve been known to rip apart pseudo campaigns like Revive or the Space Base expansions and just move the components into their stacks. I really had to force myself to complete the 6 Arnak missions for the solo/coop campaign. I still haven‘t finished even my first Legacy of Yu campaign even though I think the game is great. I loved Pandemic L1 + L2 and Clank! Legacy 1 but I am glad they are over and Pandemich L0 is still in shrink. I don‘t get on with Sleeping Gods and 7th Continent at all. Earthborne Rangers has once again been moved to the bench. I want to like those games more than I actually do. I doubt I will finish Tamashii Chronicles of Ascend.
- Auctions/Bidding. I only like auctions with fixed bids like Ra and Nidavellir and even those I have a hard time bringing to the table.
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So you aren’t the mysterioys third person who likes Magic Maze then. Ah well.
I still enjoy social deduction, preferably “pure” like The Resistance, but I find very few people want to play these days. I mention “these days” because ten years ago it seemed much easier to finbd players
Legacy games still feel wrong to me, and yes thisis my problem not yours.
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I tried Magic Maze. I even owned Magic Maze on Mars for a short time after but it was because of the „on Mars“ addendum more than any actual enjoyment of my previous encounter. It was introduced to me as a „tool“ to help teach people communication rather than as a worthwhile game. And yes the realtime component … did not help the game at all.
In theory I still enjoy social deduction… even though it involves bluffing. In practice I haven‘t played anything except Scapegoat for years and even Scapegoat has been a while. I haven‘t even managed to organize the BotC event I promised myself I would do once we had moved…
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Social party games are mostly missing from my collection. Things like Monikers, Funemployed, etc. just do not really interest me. Also don’t really have anything that requires a large group of people to play because I don’t know that many people and never really need anything that can play more than 6 or 7.
Closest games I have to breaking that are Codenames and Wavelength, and they don’t really require as much spontaneity as the games I mentioned.
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I feel like auctions are a tricky one for me. The exception is Ra but I think that one constrains your money so far that precise considerations of value become less of a burden.
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I’m another who doesn’t really like social deduction games. I have some from before I realized that but haven’t played them in years. The exception is Saboteur. There’s a game to give information about who is on which team rather than just staring at people trying to decide who is lying.
I’ve avoided the new hotness of trick taking games and climbing games. There’s a guy at my board game group who loves them so I’ve played several but never found any that beat busting out a deck of cards for spades, hearts, pitch, etc.
I’m not huge on auctions and am not sure I own any. I can’t rapidly do the calculations necessary to figure out a good deal or not. I go off vibes and almost always lose.
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I really enjoyed my one game of Magic Maze. I played it at a club with strangers. Having finished the game in disaster I noticed 2 people glowering at me, a couple I’d just played with. To hopefully diffuse things I said I was surprised they didn’t move a piece I’d got in to a position but the limited communication kept me in good humour about it. Turns out I missed a move they were both obsessing on and they were annoyed at me for not doing one move in time that they both wanted to happen so they could work together to get a piece over the line. No chance of a second game to see if we could do better as it really got their knickers in a twist. I decided it wouldn’t be politic to point out we both seemed to make a similar mistake and I thought they were dick heads before we’d started playing. Too much anxiety they dealt with by trying to control others. The upshot here is next time we meet for games I’d love it of you could bring magic maze.
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Quite a few, although I currently have an example or two of each that I do, would or could play.
I virtually always play solo so mulitplayer only games are rare in my collection, although I have a few lighter and party games for such gatherings, rare as they are. Playing solitaire, I don’t get on with games that require a lot of setup and teardown as that eats into valuable playing time. Current exceptions might be things like Firefly, A Touch of Evil or Fortune and Glory, but they don’t get to the table often and increasingly less so with each passing year. Plus, much as I’d love to try an epic civilization or 4X game - or even something like Brass: Birmingham I’d need to find the group, time and opportunity to do that with in person.
Looking at specific categories, I’m not a big fan of deckbuilders or trick takers. Plenty of good enough games are available with a standard deck of cards (or a tarot deck) and the setup/teardown of games like the Legendary series quickly become tiresome. The two I’ll keep though are Star Realms: Frontiers which is relatively quick and the solo mode works, and The Quest for El Dorado which I can see I might get to play with others.
I like playing co-op games solo, except for those when I’m playing too many roles or hands. Pandemic variants, Flash Point: Fire Rescue and Endangered at least allow me to play with only two to four roles, but playing six characters in Night of the Living Dead: Zombicide and Carnival Zombie is too much to focus on to be enjoyable as a solo experience.
I should have remembered from my teens that social deduction and bluffing games aren’t for me either. I bought Sheriff of Nottingham for a party group here but nobody wanted to “deceive” anyone else, so it was a flop. I can see with the right group how they would go down well, but not for me.
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Negotiation games don’t work for us
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After reading all the comments, I think I was a bit guilty for a few years to try and have a bit of everything in my collection. So it is tricky for me to say what could be the weak spot, even with under a 100 games in it. I think I have too many campaign games, and too many area control games given how often I play those…
Possibly the only area that comes to mind might be negotiation games or tower defence kind of games. Which I think are pretty niche. And for dexterity games I think I only have Jenga. But they aren’t categories I am that much into, I can get enough of them from other friends collections, I guess?
PS: Oh, and Legacy. I haven’t got a single Legacy game that is not a campaign or fantasy game.
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For blank spots I would have said worker placement until I looked at my collection. Turns out I have 3 which is a surprise as I think I strongly dislike most games I’ve played that utilise it. Agra, Tokyo Metro and TIdal Blades suggest I’m not as anti as I thought.
Real time games are wholly absent, I think maybe my dyspraxia might have something to do with that.
Negotiation games also absent. I have had some bad experiences previously and still don’t find it appealing as a hobby time activity.
Social deduction games similarly don’t appeal. Lying plus confirming where you sit on the social pecking order of any particular group, nah, not for me for fun. I like the structure of games to escape that stuff.
Historical combat simulation wargames also absent. For heavier games I’m happy with 18xx plus my past has had plenty of miniature wargames in it so I think I’m not drawn to counters as I’m used to painted toys. I also slightly struggle with mixed feelings on recreationally recreating vast amounts of real world death. Now I think about it Tigris and Euphrates is the exception here. It’s abstracted enough that it’s only just dawned on me.
A follow on from that is a lack of colonisation either in real world settings or the fantasy/sci fi ones that tend to tack on the real world racism under the guise of alien or fantasy races. Is Terra Mystical an exception here? Possibly.
There must be more as there are so many types of game and mechanics and themes and I have about 80 games and 25 of them are train games but it’s too much for me to think further now.
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Sounds like I’m alone here, but I’ve never gotten on with drafting or roll and write. I think it may be a related reason, you are served up decisions disconnected from what came before, and have to make a decision with no info on what is coming next. Counting cards in a flip and write situation is not a “game” to me.
I think it also comes from being heavily invested in hand management (e.g., RFTG) before I really drafted. I was so used to being able to make decisions like “two of these, though it’ll be inefficient” or “none of these” or “draw more before I commit” that drafting felt like a straightjacket in comparison.
With roll and writes, like my deeply hated Ganz Schon Clever, I also have the niggle that it’s just a complicated math + probability equation and, again, solving it isn’t a game to me, and playing it is just muddling about in the dark.
Within drafting, I love Neom. It actually gives me RFTG vibes. I think there’s more to the puzzle than just the draft, and I think it is also that you aren’t drafting for card/tile specific combos. “I need more green” is a thought I can work with when drafting, pushing my luck, whereas “I need the Pantheon (7w)” is too constrained and uncertain for the model. I also do well with small deck drafts (e.g., Inis) where you can learn the whole deck without prohibitive study and start making informed decisions. I tolerate Sushi Go because it’s light and it’s sushi.
For Roll and Writes, I tolerate Welcome To, Railroad Ink, Mindspace, and Cartographers. The latter two are really polyomino games. Still don’t love any deeply, though.
Co-op is the other main genre I don’t get on with. Someone else voiced it; the solitaire-y vibe where the game is just throwing trash at you and you have to deal with it and probably lose just feels like daily grindy life and it’s not something I want to re-create on the table.
I avoided Spirit Island for a long time due to this, but when I got it for free and played it, it was literally the first time I ever deeply enjoyed a co-op. Burgle Bros followed soon after - yeah, it’s Pandemic+ but the garbage the game throws at you is a little more telegraphed, and the tools the game gives you to respond feel right. It feels like a wrestling match rather than a slapping fight.
I wasn’t thinking of it, but after reading other posts I have struggled with auctions. Medici, Modern Art - I can’t value something that does not yet have a value? Just never know what I’m doing. Business School and Isle of Skye broke me in here, the former giving me the mindset and the latter giving me an enjoyable experience. I think I’m cool with this mechanism now, but maybe not 100% my jam.
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Birm has a lauded fan made solo mode, I think it’s called mautoma.
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