When Andor hits it's stride its a good show, not just a "good for Star Wars" show. If they had just removed some of the excess scenes, a little more editing, then this could have been the best thing to have come out of Disney's Star Wars. It's like they had all these great set pieces but didn't know how to connect them so they made these convoluted, and mostly pointless, segues.
I think the problem ultimately is that they are writing for a 5 season story arc where they have plenty of time for payoffs, but their star backed out and agreed to only two seasons. So that is going to leave them with a lot of story arcs for otherwise good characters that are going to lack payoffs.
a) At this point, there is not time left to have a reasonable resolution to "where is my sister". I'm not sure if they were planning that, or whether they just needed some way for his cover to get blown that survived fridge logic, but with one season left it's not important enough to pursue.
b) At this point, as much as I love Syril, with just one season left and his relevancy decreasing all the time, he just needed to disappear after episode three.
c) Mon Motha's story arc has so far been irrelevant. It lacks it's own foil/adversary. It's been very choppy. She's experiencing no character growth. She's stuck in the same place churning her wheels. She's a great character, the set design for the embassy is wonderful, and the perspective from the Senate in this period is welcome, but we either need much more time with her or much less. There is also a big problem that her husband dynamic is too much like Tim in the first story arc, which makes almost anywhere they could go with this story redundant and/or uninteresting.
d) Vel and Cinta are decent characters, but they've had absolutely nothing to do since episode six and all the time we've digressed to follow Vel and/or Cinta in this period is time wasted. Additionally, Vel is less interesting of a character than Nemik or Skeen so we are having a bit of a "all the good secondary characters are dying" problem last seen in The Mandalorian season 1.
e) At this point, it's hard to see why we needed the flashbacks to Andor's childhood. They did not help us understand the character, and they don't seem to be mystery that we are going to revisit in a story arc. Season 2 will only give us time for 4 more story arcs, so unless we devote 3 episodes to how what happened on that planet is somehow relevant to the Galaxy as a whole, they were a waste of time.
Chopped down to present day Andor and Dedra, the story is very tight and fast moving and the time lost on stories that aren't going anywhere could have at this point fit in more story arc - perhaps more with Saw or other rebel leaders in this period. Or else we could have given Mon a personal foil in the form of one of those people invited to the dinner party she didn't want, and actually shown Mon being a skilled politician instead of showing how futile everything she does is again and again.
Not saying any of this is bad - the writing is actually solid - but do understand why some people find it slow moving and don't think it's going to overcome that criticism given we only have one more season to tell everyone's stories.
