Man, I actually used to be one of the defenders of SuperS but I have to admit, now that I'm up in age and am rewatching the series in its entirety again, SuperS gets more and more difficult to sit through. As a teenager, I generally always ranked it below what I considered the "great" seasons (Classic, S and Stars) but above R, which I considered the worst. Now after rewatching them, though, I'm almost inclined to place R before SuperS. There's a lot of things I don't like about R, such as the breakup arc, Chibi-usa and her brattiness, and some deviations from the manga, but the one thing I can say for it is it's a relatively well-paced and well-written season. SuperS just really suffers from some horrible pacing and writing, the whole thing feels so meandering and pointless because it's literally almost all filler up until the 6-part finale, and not even good filler at that. I do like Fish Eye and his redemption episode, and some of the comedic episodes are fun, and the finale actually is really awesome. I even like the story concept of SuperS a lot, I love stuff that's surreal and dreamlike, it's just the poor execution that drags it down. Whereas I'm not as keen on the story concept of R, but it's much more effectively plotted and executed.
I think one of the biggest things was the romance between Chibiusa and Helios/Pegasus... as a teenager, I found it cute and endearing to watch. Now as an adult, it just bores me... I find myself really wishing that the season included the Outers and stuck closer to the manga storyline, as many have stated. Also worth noting is that I wonder wtf Ikuhara was doing exactly while making SuperS... I'm actually a big Ikuhara fan and pretty much everything else he's made that I've seen (Sailor Moon S, Penguindrum, Revolutionary Girl Utena) is among some of my favorite anime of all time.... so how did he go so wrong?? I'm hoping that maybe the failure of SuperS is maybe more due to the writers they had on staff and not so much Ikuhara....
I think one of the biggest things was the romance between Chibiusa and Helios/Pegasus... as a teenager, I found it cute and endearing to watch. Now as an adult, it just bores me... I find myself really wishing that the season included the Outers and stuck closer to the manga storyline, as many have stated. Also worth noting is that I wonder wtf Ikuhara was doing exactly while making SuperS... I'm actually a big Ikuhara fan and pretty much everything else he's made that I've seen (Sailor Moon S, Penguindrum, Revolutionary Girl Utena) is among some of my favorite anime of all time.... so how did he go so wrong?? I'm hoping that maybe the failure of SuperS is maybe more due to the writers they had on staff and not so much Ikuhara....