I would first like to start by saying that yeah, this anime does a lot of shitty tropes and doesn't treat women well in a lot of ways. It also has a few really awesome female characters, which is a bizarre dichotomy that I don't really know will be reconciled. But yeah I cannot stress enough how problematic many parts of this anime are.

Also probably important to note is I'm 8 episodes in so if there's some even bigger bullshit that comes up I'm unaware of it yet.

One of the things the show does have going for it though is a masterful use of the language of film. There are a lot of shots and scenes that don't really do a ton of shoehorned exposition or world building in the typical overblown anime way. Instead there's a lot more focus on the interiority of the characters and they convey it really well.

One such scene is the one which the protagonist Shinji is in his robot and stabbing an Angel (the big bad aliens) with a techno-knife. The whole time just letting out this blood-curdling scream that captures his frustration at and defiance toward... well basically everything. Nobody really says "oh he's an angry frustrated kid in a lot of ways" but you just know because of everything leading up to the scene before hand.

I get now why the show is such a big deal to some people. There's a lot of nuance in a lot of the scenes, even in some of the goofy slice-of-life ones. I would definitely not call it a masterpiece because it has some major flaws but I can understand why it's considered such a foundational text, particularly in the mecha subgenre.

I don't really have anything to weigh in on the new dub or music choices cause I'm watching older subs since I don't have netflix lol, but I hear there's a ton of Discourse about it, most of it not great.