The live action did change a lot, but thankfully didn't 'break' anything for me. It dropped a lot of side characters, spent a bit more time than we needed on chick shit, and made the East Blue villains less threatening overall. A lot of my praise for it comes from the fact that it didn't seem embarrassed of itself like so many live action debacles do. Like, they saw it was goofy, but just jumped in with enthusiasm, so I had to respect that.

I think the actor/writer strike helped them out a lot as well. Otherwise the marketing leading up to launch would have been pandering non-stop about Koby's actor being trans, or gay/black whoever swaps. Since I watched it without having all of that annoying baggage, I kept a more open mind. Since the show didn't beat me over the head with identity, and one thing Oda did actually block was crew/character romance, so I think that helped quite a bit.