I can agree to a point that Mari is not well fleshed out, but if you take the Rebuild movies in a vacuum she actually isn't that far behind most other major characters, she just doesn't have the benefit of the audience having a lot of history with her general persona to fill in the gaps subconsciously like we do with the original cast. I'm not sure how they could have given her the same level of characterization the other main cast got with the pre-existing materials within just these films without making her to sole protagonist. It's certainly a flaw in the overall design, but I can see how they came across the finish line without being able to correct it.

As far as Anno flipping off the fanbase, yup, Rebuild 4 does that in fairly obvious ways in its back half, while also making it clear that Anno has always seen and approached this franchise from a different perspective than the fans. He's been making an edgelordy Star Wars* where everything in the world exists to be cool set dressing for the emotional drama he's trying (with admittedly clumsy articulation a lot of the time) to tell, while the fans have been treating it like it's Babylon 5 if that series had 5 times the world building effort put into it before scene 1 had ever been story-boarded.

The man has gotten some death threats in the past about this series, so him having a somewhat adversarial dynamic with the section of the fanbase not familiar with the MST3K theme and/or Bellisario's Maxim doesn't seem too unreasonable to me. And giant biomechanical golem robots having their brawl in the TV set versions of the various locations seen previously in the series amused me greatly. IMHO, YMMV, etc.

	-={(Astynax)}=- "*I realize that a lot of the now deprecated Star Wars EU did an admirable job of backfilling somewhat logical and solid world-building into the franchise, but none of that was Lucas' vision for the story, as made evident by the prequel trilogy when he tried his hand at directly filling in some blanks."