The show is not faithful to the book but it has good production value, a fairly interesting story and is overall very watchable. The passing is sometimes questionable but 7.4 seems like a fair rating to me.
Frankly, it didn't seem so good for the general public either. It's very slow and confusing. The emperors' plot is actually more entertaining. Totally unconnected with the books' premise (empire crumbling under the weight of its own bureaucracy) but the actors are fine.
The missed opportunity seems to be too big to wrap my head around. It could have started something truly great, another Space Opera to rival Star wars and star trek duopoly.
The only way to faithfully film the book would be to make some sort of anthology series, and I don't think that format works well for big-budget prestige drama. As I've said elsewhere, might have been better to start with Prelude to Foundation, perhaps.
I found pretty much everything not directly involving the Empires pretty awful in Foubdation… Particularly the parts set on Terminus were just 90’s scifi junk.
