Hi, I started watching this episode and it’s great so far! Will post my thoughts once finishing it. One thing I would argue for the beginning though is to reinstate a version of the first scene, as it introduces Mando in a much cooler way. In this version, the crawl states he’s an expert bounty hunter, but the first scene we get with Din is a dinosaur wiping the floor with him. Seeing how cool he is for his first scene would do a lot, although it would add to the runtime slightly.
Somewhat unrelated, but after the Filoni movie announcement I’ve been thinking of ways to combine all these shows into one storyline - it might be cool to label the movie saga as Heir to the Empire and have the subtitle be the focus. S1 could be The Mandalorian, S2 could be The Jedi, Boba could be The Bounty Hunter, and S3 could relate to Bo. Then Ahsoka would follow a similar theme, and eventually the real movie. This way all the shows could follow one storyline with each “film” focusing on a different thing.
I dont disagree with you about the opening scene. One of the difficulties with making these movie edits is deciding what needs to be sacrificed for structure and pacing, and to protect the runtime. It does show us Mando at his bounty hunting peak, but in terms of pacing it made the first act too long. I tried to compensate by removing most of the occasions where he gets shot (Ig-11, Fennec, Gideon) to make him seem a more competent warrior - he gets shot an awful lot of times during season 1.