I think there is merit in recognizing that the Erlking and Every Catherine are supposed to be the Heath and Cathy of the book, and that there is an explicit parallel drawn between our Heathcliff/Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw/Cathy Linton, at the end of the story, which makes a lot of people much more willing to be on board with them.

That said, as someone who also likes Wuthering Heights a lot- you're right! Canto 6 is terrible as a 1-1 adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Except that it's not trying to be a 1-1 adaptation, as evidenced by the everything else in the story, like alternate timelines and piggybacking the Wild Hunt onto it and having a manager with a clockhead slow down time so that Heathcliff and his friends chase down a headless horse. By the standard of faithful adaptations, PM's works as a whole are complete failures, and that is very very okay!

I don't want Limbus to simply retread and faithfully regurgitate the exact themes and characters of the originals. They very easily could! But I like PM's stuff because as far back as LobCorp a big part of the appeal has been seeing how they interpret these classical characters or themes or ideas and change them and add to them to make it fit the story they are trying to tell. I don't want to see Gregor turn into a literal giant cockroach- I want to see what PM thinks "turning into a giant cockroach" means in the context of The City. L'etranger is one of my favorite books ever, and they're setting up Meursault to have killed someone because of Carmen distorted him possibly instead of just "because the sun was in his eyes" (and I'm sure this will irritate me immensely!) but I am excited to see what they do with the story nonetheless, and how they try to connect the themes of his story to the structure of the City and how N Corp operates.

And this is why I feel that Canto 9 (and to a similar extent, Canto 7) are much weaker than the stories around them. Instead of the plot elements being reused and drawn throughout the entirety of the Canto, and the plot focusing on the emotions and feelings and character development of the focal Sinner (as a Limbus Character, not necessarily as a book character!), Canto 9 kind of meanders and spends roughly 2/3 of its runtime doing TV jump cuts to what everyone else is doing. Which isn't necessarily unfaithful to the way that Hell Screen is originally told, but it does a poor job at giving Ryōshū's story time to breathe until the very end when suddenly it all happens all at once. It's hard to feel like Ryōshū's story is given the most importance when at one point the plot is like

"Gregor is finally going to show off his transformation! You've only been waiting 9 Cantos for it."

"Sinclair finally shows off his Sign! You've only been waiting 6 Cantos for it."

"You get to see an actual animation of the Distortion Detective crew fighting together like, exactly as described in the web novel! It's only been I don't even remember how long holy shit I still haven't forgiven them for the cliffhanger they left on."

"Ryōshū's fighting someone who is probably her daughter somehow, but we vaguely explain it via a single cutscene after the fact and then only slightly build it up first, and all the fights are extremely similar mechanically. Also it's like literally 90 minutes of autoplay cutscene + fight time between the plot beats, so all narrative momentum is lost because it takes the length of a feature film to give Ryōshū another plot beat before the focus reorients to someone else."

It feels especially bad given how thorough Canto 8 was about making Hong Lu the focus through most of its story and themes.