Cheers for the feedback Sean Sterio.

To your points:

I agree, this episode is fairly rushed and doesn’t quite hang together well enough to be something you’d imagine seeing on TV. The pacing is quick, especially the wrap-up (with Bail Organa’s radio call at the end). It’s the episode that’s taken the most work and the most iteration, but since the original episode’s content was so very poor, I’ve really had to settle here for getting us through it as quickly as possible. I think doing that, plus warning viewers that it’s not great, so they can just get through it and on to better content, is the lesser of the available evils. That said, I’m always open to tangible improvements if anyone has further ideas they’d like to demonstrate.
Regarding Ahsoka, I’m fairly confident that I’ve included the vast majority of her interactions with Anakin and her ‘snippiness’. I’ve trimmed a small number of her most outstanding annoyances here, but nothing material, and left most of it in, because, as you say, we need to see her develop and mature from this baseline. The remaining early season one episodes preserve more of the snips/sky-guy behaviour. Maintaining her growth was key - I just sought to minimise those elements which first put people off her right from the beginning.
As for Ventress, this is kind of how the original played out. If you watch the originals in chronological order, Ventress is there to distract the Jedi in order to enable the invasion fleet to land, then she just disappears from the story - in the original, it’s to go steal Jabba’s son, whereas in my version, it’s feasibly to go prepare to rescue Nute Gunray (though I have considered putting the scene where she’s given that mission into this one). But in a lot of ways this is an issue with the original content. It was important to me to include Ventress in this episode because she is a strong presence in my first season.
Regarding the droids, I haven’t trimmed them much. Many have requested that I cut out their voices altogether, but I think that’s impossible as some of their dialogue in various episodes carries important plot information. And I don’t find them as bad as some do. So I’ve trimmed their highest goofiness, whilst preserving a good amount of it.

Either way, thank you for your feedback - I hope you continue with the show, because this episode is easily the weakest and the rest get much stronger quickly. I’d be very interested to see others’ interpretations of that first episode, but I think I’ve taken it as far as I can myself.

Keep it coming!