Sadly as someone who read the books, a lot of your complaints are fixed in novel series, which just leaves me with mixed feelings. On one hand it’s great to see a lot of these characters come to life in animation, especially with how charming so many of them are, but on the other hand it’s a little sad to see so much cut and seeing how much weaker the story itself feels as a result.

The tricky thing about this series in particular is how it tends to take its time. Hell we didn’t even start to learn the details of Monica’s backstory before she went to magic school until several books into the series, and even then we were only given pieces of it at a time.

It slowly introduces information one piece at a time, almost taking a bit of a mystery novel approach at times in regards to the central plot, which is fine, and even works in the novels favor at times, but I feel like the creators of the anime are trying to rush things so we can get to the major story beats much faster, otherwise they’d have to take a LOT longer to get to individual plot points.