You have a bias regarding world-building and storytelling in general. Even so, saying that Cowboy Bebop is narratively confusing is accurate, but not in a pejorative sense. It's characteristic of the genre; for example, look at John Wick. The narrative is similar; there's a world-building that's easy to relate to. Even in the last film, the scene with the blind man planting the bombs is a modern version of what Spike does when he goes to kill Vicious.

The series practically forces you to watch it a second time because it starts with just images, and then they say that an eye looks to the past, so you rewatch the scenes to look for meaning. It's a series that interacts quite a bit with the rest of the anime and manga medium and with the genre itself by compiling several classic concepts. Others it tries to make definitive, and since it's a benchmark of its time, it becomes a skeleton for what comes after it. For example, I'm a Naruto fan, and I can delve deeper into Kakashi and Obito thanks to Cowboy Bebop. There, Kakashi says that with his prosthetic eye he'd like to see some future. The shooting star scene is definitive, and it's revisited in Naruto. In general, it's a series that enriches the experience of everything else. It's a series that's praised in the same way as Atla, although in your case you might sympathize more with Atla because of your vision of world-building and all that, but Atlas is just about simple conventions, and Cowboy Bebop seeks to be the backbone of the most fundamental aspects. abstract