Wanted to wait until more of your thoughts were posted before I addressed them.
I think we're agreed on most everything here. Both in terms of how it looks and sounds, the series fits pretty well, even if there's some jank here and there. I don't like that the intro sequence is full of spoilers, something that sets it very much apart from the anime where the intro was used to show off some of the animation and to symbolically represent many of the characters. It's hard to match the anime Tank! intro and I wasn't expecting that here, but the lack of focus on the characters, replacing it largely with scattered moments from the series, made it difficult to enjoy.
We're agreed on Mustafa Shakir, who not only absolutely embodied the character to the best extent of any of the main cast (too early to say with Edward, though I think the backlash against her portrayal was... a little too big considering we only got the single scene), but added to it in ways that I appreciated greatly. I know not everyone liked the fact that he has a daughter, but the whole fatherly Jet aspect really worked for me, especially that scene where he attends her recital remotely as a hologram and Spike is fighting goons in the background while he's dancing it up in the foreground. I do think they somewhat neutered his story by having his partner be the only obviously corrupt cop (in the anime, the police force because it was basically all corrupt, which put him in stark contrast to his former fellows), but his performance was spectacular.
As for the cons... yeah, you'll get no disagreement from me.
Vicious was the single worst part of this series, and that's saying something. I'm honestly not sure if you included enough "no's" to truly represent how bad of a move this was. In that anime, he's a phantom who haunts Spike, appearing at discrete moments to instill a real sense of dread into the series. In this, he's on screen so much that any enigmatic aspects of his character vanished in the first two episodes. He's whiny, got his position solely due to his father being what he was, and seems far too emotional to be the cold, merciless killer that the anime portrayed. It's especially frustrating because he's in every episode, even recruiting Mad Pierrot, meaning that his presence pervades almost every story beat of the show. Part of what I liked so much about the anime was that the events of the show would occur due to the cast's choices and mistakes more often than due to some kind of external meddling, but this takes so much agency away from them by making them targets of the Syndicate (or Vicious, specifically). They're reacting rather than acting.
I didn't so much mind the "Fearless" aspect, though it weirded me out every time they called Spike by that nickname (though Spike was actually his pseudonym and Fearless was the original name he discarded... what was his original name, anyway?). It's a boring way to do what they did much better in the anime, as you said, I just didn't care too much about it. More of a missed opportunity to be subtle (there are a lot of those) than anything else.
Don't care so much about the role reversals, either, though it does take the wind out of some characters' sails. Pandering though it might have been, it's a different take on the story and I don't mind that. I do mind that it disrupts the flow of the stories it's telling and takes away opportunities to really dig into Spike as a character and engage more in what separates him from Vicious. In that regard, though, Julia gets in the way far more often and in more glaring ways than Faye ever did. It is incredibly frustrating that she is turned into a character with no power whatsoever (in the anime, it was hinted that she was as much of a badass as Spike and Vicious in her own right), only for her to turn around and steal the spotlight at the end with next to no warning. Considering the sheer amount of background they give to Vicious and Spike's relationship in this adaptation, it's frustrating that the closure we get (if you can call it that) comes from Julia's gun.
That's not to say that I liked this portrayal of Faye. I personally don't mind lesbianizing her, nor was I perturbed by the changes to her outfit. What I did mind was that the lesbian aspects of her character were delivered in a scene that was more eye candy than anything else, and what's more, they were with a character we and she had just met rather than the result of any kind of built up relationship. I was frustrated that they almost entirely removed any reference to her being a femme fatale when she is one of anime's greatest examples, though I was far more upset that they almost entirely nixed her motivations. No reference to her gambling addiction. No reference to her being massively in debt due to medical expenses incurred while she was frozen and conned onto her thereafter. We get some allusions regarding her interest in her own background, and while those were good, we lose so much of what makes Faye Faye.
And I think that's generally my biggest problem with the series. They named these characters after their anime counterparts, but so many of these characters aren't anything like their anime selves. Gren isn't Gren in almost any way, having been turned from a soldier who suffered the ill effects of a drug and fights against the Syndicate into a sassy gay lackey. Annie isn't a motherly figure running a small store who Spike turns to very occasionally, but a large club owner who effectively runs an underground operation and helps the characters out every other episode. Julia isn't a Syndicate member, but is singer who found herself locked into a relationship with Vicious out of fear. And when it comes to characters that don't appear, the live action show only pays them lip service, like including Cowboy Andy on a list of outlaws rather than including him in an amazing comedic rivalry with Spike. The show is just full of missed opportunities built on trying to shake things up that just go nowhere, and the runtime is often padded with extras that do nothing to add to the story. It just feels like a simultaneously bloated and anemic story, with each coming up in all the wrong places.
I've already talked about Julia a bit, and I agree with what you've said of her. For me, what's most frustrating is the combination of her being a damsel in distress for 95% of the show and being someone who actively seeks power for the remaining 5%, the latter coming out of nowhere. For such an enigmatic and interesting character from the anime, she really loses a step when they shine a light on her the whole way through. I know much of this story doesn't follow the anime (she's certainly not with Vicious over so much of the story there), but part of what makes her so compelling in the anime is that we barely know her when she first arrives on the scene with a gun to Spike's head. With all the background they gave us, there was an opportunity to make her compelling in a different way, but they didn't manage it, especially when her complaint with Spike was that he should have fought his way into the Syndicate (likely an impossible task at any point in the series) to rescue her sooner. As for taking control of the Syndicate, even if we assume she could do it this way, she gave no indication as to her ambitions earlier. Throwing in a character trait at the last minute, even if it's borne out of not wanting to be afraid anymore, requires more than just a couple of throw-away lines, especially since it will obviously put her in the crosshairs of a lot of dangerous people. Before this scene, the most she'd done is plot to remove Vicious from the picture, which at least made some sense since he was so abusive. This may have been pandering, but I'd be fine with pandering if it was actually built up meaningfully. This was just trashy, and while it gave me some hope for a second season that would solidly diverge from the anime's plot, that's all it did (and the second season was cancelled anyway, so that's not happening).
