1 Gurren Lagann:

- Simon is the main character.  Kamina plays a smaller role than you think.
- The first third or so of the series is about Simon learning to be brave and confident.  I agree he's often whiny and annoying in this phase, but it's a bit much to call him completely lacking in backbone.  He always does what he has to do, even though he's scared.
- The animation gets better as the series goes on.  It never struck me as bad, personally (well, except #4); must be a matter of visual taste.
- It was Brickmuppet who hated episode 5 (although I note that he also finished the volume and seems semi-positive).  I was surprised by his reaction, because I think episode 5 is perhaps Kamina at his best.  Of course he's being a jerk -- because he rejects the village's terribly unjust order (as he sees it).  It's the first direct exploration of what's probably the series' central theme, the debate between pessimistically/conservatively accepting a limitation or optimistically trying to overcome the limitation.

Hope I didn't fanboy out on you too much there.  If you don't like it, c'est la vie; I would just hate to see you drop it based on mistaken predictions.

2

Reviews and opinions are always controversial. Let's acknowledge that you and I disagree.

3 Ah. See, I'd thought maybe you were holding off on finishing the first volume because it (widely reported) ends in the middle of an arc shift that roto-tills basically everything you've come to expect of the show, and you wanted to have the next volume ready and waiting.

There is a bit of listlessness in the early episodes when they were trying to decide what to do with the show. (They were only out to make a toy-selling vehicle to begin with). That bizarre little prologue bears only a resemblance to where the show ends up.

Oh well. In the unlikely event you ever decide to come back to the show, you've seen enough to jump straight to 7/8 and not be completely lost.

4 I got bogged down in Gurren Lagann and never got past about episode 4 either.  Apparently it gets awesome shortly afterwards; when I get the chance to watch more of it, I'll let you know.

And completely agreed about Green Green.  I only made it through two episodes of that one.

5 It seems that a lot of series that many reviewers like fail your test by not grabbing you early enough.  Sometimes thats going to be a pure failure of storycrafting, but I've seen series where they deliberately set up a scenario thats mildly interesting to begin with, and then they give you a big early climax where they destroy it all and leave you hanging to see what they do next.  Obviously you want to make the original stuff interesting enough to keep you around on it's own, or throw in the gotcha early enough that you don't lose your audience first.

I suspect (I'm only at episode 9, never watched the subs) that TTGL is doing this, and just failed to do it well enough to hook you.  Certainly, as has already been said, your expectatations and conclusions as to what is happening and who is the focus are off if you quit at episode 4, and that's going to be true of a great many series.

Figure 17 is a long time back for me, about due for a re-watch.  As I recall, the pacing was kind of variable, but more often slow than quick.  I still quite enjoyed the series, but if the pacing is what made you leave, then no, it's not for you.

6 You're right Kamina is an ass but there's a method to his madness.
If you remember the opening scene of TTGL episode one, the captain was Simon. So as you can see he changes and grows quite a backbone.
You can skip ahead and watch episode 8. of TTGL. If you like the battle scenes you'll like ep. 8. The whole show is a big battle with a whopper of a story shift at the end. Kamina dies. You would probably do well to watch the last 5 minutes of ep. 7 for an important setup to ep. 8 though. And if you're not aware episode 6 is the onsen episode.