It's actually one of those things where, treatment of women aside, the earlier episodes look cooler than they are before you realize that they don't really have anywhere interesting to go. In hinRABight, a lot of the earlier episodes look like they're stalling for time, too.
I had a really positive reaction to the first 2 or 3 episodes, and I think that halo affected my view of things for quite a while. Then I hit the back half, saw what kind of show this really was, and that negative halo kind of wiped out whatever good feelings I had for the first half. It's an interesting show, but I don't think I'd call it a good one.
I need to watch the Planetes series, too, and it's kind of funny that the exact opposite thing happened with Freedom. The first episodes of that series made me go, "What the hell, this show isn't going anywhere" until I saw them all and started spotting the patterns and larger structure in place. Once I recognized that, the whole series got better in my eyes, to the point where it's probably one of my favorite anime series in recent memory.
