Movie and television reviews have been around for decades. There are only so many hours in a day/week, and everyone has to decide how to spend their finite amount of time, so "pre-judging" a show by early episodes is nothing new. But if you want to try to watch everything as a completionist, start to finish, go right ahead.

But as the GP of this sub-thread, I'm was not so much "critiquing" and simply observing that there's a lot ways for people to spend their time, so if a show "wastes" 2 out of 8 episodes with a lot of what folks consider non-plot, then why should I spend my time watching it?

Again, I haven't watched it, and I'll wait until the season is over and see what the consensus is after the full season. But even if it does turn out to be good as whole, why did the show runners seemingly not do much with the plot for a quarter of the season?

The Expanse took about four episodes to really 'set' the universe, but even the first two episodes had quite a bit that happened ("Remember the Cant!").

How does a show producer worth their salt not know that you have to give juicy bits early in a show's run?