quintessential quintuplets alternates between things that would never happen, a man complaining about juicy steak and buttery lobster, and gratuitous fan service.

My bias is I automatically exclude gratuitous fan service from being peak. So this was unlikely to ever be good enough to break that bias.

With that said, I feel like there is a good story buried under all the jap bullshit.

I think the entire first season can mostly be thrown away. When he was initially asked by Itsuki for help, he either should have said yes and that would have been his in with the sisters, or Itsuki should have pushed harder and he eventually broke. I dont think the tutoring being a job did anything but make it weird jap stuff, and the adversarial relationship didn't help at all.

The show didn't feel like anything worth while till after he quit the job of being a tutor and became a tutor cause he wanted to help.

Then there was the Yotsuba twist. It didn't really feel like a cleverly set up twist. It felt like the show was intentionally trying to trick the viewer, and then it had to drop a massive lore dump to make her character and actions make sense. The movie just ended up feeling very forced to get the ending it had.