And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.
It's almost like those "filler" episodes in all the previous series actually had a function of allowing the series' interpersonal relationships to gel and solidify. When everything is always an emergency and everyone must react RIGHT NOW OR ELSE it tends to wear people out. There's nothing wrong with missions that just go somewhat routine and people get to interact with strange and interesting people from entirely different situations and places.
You mean costing reddit bandwidth while avoiding ads. Unless your argument is that reddit itself is the ad?