I watched Bleach years ago on Amazon Prime when i was a kid. Prime only had up to the beginning of the Bounts arc at that time, so I never finished it. I recently found it on Hulu and am watching it all the way through, filler and all. I'm about to begin the final arc and I wanted to share my thoughts.

First, I disagree that things went downhill after the SS arc. For me, the show temporarily jumped the shark after the Grimmjow fight. Everything before that was honestly kinda great. I didn't even realize the Bount arc was filler. It was slow at the start but I really enjoyed it by the end.

The Captain Amagai arc was interesting but it killed the pacing. The Zanpakuto Rebellion arc was really good at first but I kinda hated it by the end because of how cheap the show felt. The second half of the arrancar saga started mid-decent in my opinion, and was great by the end. And the Invading Army arc was so good I wish it was canon.

Personally, the show got really really bad in-between the Grimmjow fight and the actual Ulquiorra fight. Everything else has been incredible. I'm sure if I didn't watch the filler, or watched it afterwards that I would enjoy it a lot more. Although I don't see how I can fully watch the middle filler without breaking continuity, as Uryu has his more advanced Quincy weapon but Ichigo will lose his powers by the end of the Arrancar arc. Either way, I'm excited to finish the series and start the new one. Eventually I may watch the movies.

Let me preface this by saying that I've read the entire manga during release, and own the volumes. I'm a huge BLEACH fan that has played pretty much every game, read all LNs, watched interviews and closely followed Kubo-sensei. In my opinion, this season's finale undermines severely the structure and message of the series, in particular the final arc.

I don't even know where to start listing what I dislike about it, so here are some scattered thoughts:

1. The 0th squad was supposed to be defeated quickly, narratively. It established the Schutzstaffel as formidable foes while simultaneously saving face (they were defeated by surprise) and avoids potential nonsense with their Bankais. Now we get some absurd stuff about "their powers being too great to release", yet Ichibe is fighting with Bankai just fine, and later on Ichigo's bankai doesn't destroy all of existence, despite being by far the strongest thing to ever exist, after the original Soul King.
2. To add all of this filler in their tight 52 episode schedule, they had to cut out a bunch of great moments of silence where the audience gets to really think things through and understand the characters and their motivations. As a result, pacing gets demolished. If the filler was simply expanding on what was already there in the manga I wouldn't mind as much, but they're adding stuff that makes no sense in-universe.
3. WHY CUT OUT THE BIG REVEAL FROM THE SEASON FINALE? Worse still, what was originally a "oh shit, this might actually be unwinnable" moment in the manga was relegated to flashback in this arc.

Anyway, there are a bunch of other negative things I have to say about this adaptation, but overall I'm still enjoying it, bar some moments of real annoyance. I just wish they were more faithful to Kubo-sensei's original work.

Just watched it, very exciting. My thoughts in the comments.

Are the mods planning on making discussion posts?

There is going to be some time while this grows in to a real community, but feel free to post anything and everything related to Bleach. Canon, fan art + stories, anime, manga, anything to celebrate the fact that this series rose from the ashes and we get to experience the final arc in the high quality anime it always deserved.