I do think that it could be converted from a 10 episode show of ~20 minutes per episode to a 5 episode show with ~40 minutes per episode.
I also noticed toward the beginning that there were WAY too many scenes where people were telling Lawson “so are you going to call the Empire now?” and then he explained like 3-4 times why he wasn’t going to. So there’s definitely a few little scenes that can be trimmed here and there.
Having only seen half of it so far, this is what I noticed too. A lot of the scenes are just ponderously slow and repetitive. I get that they’re trying to do the Fisher Price version of Heat, but Heat (which I saw for the first time recently, insanely good) has so much else going on and doesn’t fit. It’s more than having a police guy with a criminal nemesis he’s looking for, a city landscape, and family scenes to humanize the police guy. Especially when the Empire comes in and makes all of it unnecessary. Andor is much closer, naturally.
I do appreciate the more limited cast, setting, and art style. After almost two decades of mediocrity, Filoni has finally crawled his way into making something I kind of like.