Not a bad summer at all I'd say. By no means a 'good' one though either. This is how I remember the summer:
June started off with a very warm weekend then was changeable for the rest of the month, there was a short fine spell around d 25/26th and Eastern areas had a hot day on the 17th iirc. It wasn't overly wet, just non descript. June 2000 and 2008 was similar to it.
July was poor until around the 12th and as you say it was the worst part of the summer and wouldn't have been out of place in July's of 2007 or 2023. It quickly flipped around the weekend of the 13th and I remember many warm days and the heatwave at the end. Many areas got great storms iirc around the 29th/30th, although we missed out here.
August wasn't unlike 2004 in many respects. The month started off warm, and thundery with flooding rains in some areas. The mid part was quite hot and sunny then the rest of the month was fair and mainly dry but not that hot.
I think there may be 2 reasons why the summer gets a worse rap than it deserves. The first is simply many summers around this point were pretty good (bar 2000, which is probably on a par with this one). The second I suspect is the heat that did occur was quite often east-uk based. I think the west missed out on most of the heat and was notably cloudy when the 30C days hit the east. People loving in the west may therefore have a worse perception of it.