1 Yes, wait.

Most of the recent episode was denoument from the big battle, with a large dollop of princess in concert (i.e.: let's sell some music).  Bad point to be hung on; the climax seems to be an episode early and nothing is happening here.

But at the end of it there's a twist; something is being forshadowed, and it's not obvious which way it's going to go. Spoiler, so behind the tag:  The orange-haired technical expert gets an emergency message scroll, after which she makes a lame excuse and goes off by herself.  She's obviously very upset; I'm thinking that this is news into the research on how to get Cinque back home.  But does it mean success or failure?

2 ubu, the episode you refer to is 11. 12 has already aired, 13 will be the last episode, airing Saturday.

I concur with waiting btw. Watching everything up to date would probably piss most people off.

3 I liked Sekirei and have no issues with the direction in it. What made me stop watching was its endless nature (point against the recent article about anime having contained stories... I mean, you just looke at Dragonball and the way Toriyama was made to extend it!)

4 ...so it's got a decent pedigree.

Which is somehow appropriate for a series called "Dog Days."

5 Evidently I was further behind than I thought.

6

Pete, there are many anime series which go on and on and on...

Fairy Tail
Gintama
Naruto
One Piece
Keroro Gunsou

...just off the top of my head. But there are far more which genuinely tell a complete story. I could reel off 30 examples, and so could you.

American TV series which tell a complete story are much more rare, enough so that they are noteworthy for that reason alone.

7 Where do you put those where creators had to create midpoint endings, like in Fruits Basket?

8

It depends on how well they're done. I actually thought that that the ending of the Fruits Basket anime was good.

On the other hand, the Venus Versus Virus ending was a travesty. And the ending of Mahoromatic is legendarily awful.

There are series which kind of split the difference, doing a reasonably satisfactory ending that doesn't necessarily prevent followon series. Strike Witches is an example of that.

9 Anime that gets a "new" ending like that isn't really in the same basket, though. Those are derivative works, not new productions. The original Naruto story simply wasn't affected by its suitability as an anime. Heck, every one on your list is from the "manga series converted to anime" style. Making conclusions about anime narrative structure based on them is as sensible as taking superhero movies and using them as the source of your critical theory of the art of film...

I watched enough to get the idea that they actually had a plot in mind, so that's good. And the frisbee scene was very cute indeed. (Lese majeste a little, but he got away with it...) It's not the best thing going this season, but that's more because this season turned out to have an unusual number of good shows.

10 If you talk about long-running anime series, you have to mention Sazae-san. 6400 episodes and counting! Granted, the episodes are only 6 minutes each, but still, it has been in production since 1969!