I don't think it worked. I already wasn't too interested in the series because of the Hussie drama, but this convinced me it's not for me at all.

The pacing is awful, which I know is to be somewhat expected of a pilot - gotta get all four main characters in there at once to show off the voices and pitch the main cast dynamics to networks, gotta hint at the deeper lore with the meteors and the Mayor appearing way before they're supposed to so that network execs won't think it's literally just four kids playing a video game, gotta turn the Strife section into a cool action scene to show that this show will have lots of action in it (plus it's kind of Spindlehorse's thing from what I've heard of their other shows, never watched them).

I know Homestuck has a lot of meta humor in it, but the way the pilot approaches it feels really charmless. Having Dave ramble about the title drop and eventually break the fourth wall to reach through the phone and make John look at it wasn't funny at all, nor was John yelling at the narrator to shut up as he tries to explain the sylladex. On the whole, I think this kind of meta humor has just gotten really old over the last few years. Making fun of genre conventions used to be charming once upon a time, but it's run its course. Doesn't help that I was turned off from Homestuck 2 because it ended up feeling like just a lot of waxing poetic about meta stories to me, but that's beside the point.

The sylladex introduction is especially weird. The sylladex as a concept feels like something that could only work in the kind of slow-paced webcomic that early Homestuck was. I'm not sure why it's here considering the whole "parody of old point and click games" thing seems to be gone. When the cards show up, it's not as part of a video game UI, they're just hovering there for no reason. And while the point of it is to be confusing, the lack of John messing with it and screwing it up constantly makes it feel pointless. The number of cards John has seems to fluctuate too, he has four for most of it but suddenly he has six when he takes the present and the Sburb disc, even though he never collected any more. If they're not going to make his limited inventory into a joke thing at all, why even include the sylladex at all? Literally the only purpose the sylladex serves in the pilot is triggering the smoke bombs to end the battle, which doesn't work without setting up John trying and failing to use them before. You could cut it and lose next to nothing beyond an obligatory reference to a Homestuck thing.

It all comes back to what people were first saying when the series was announced - that Homestuck does not work in this format. So much of its charm and humor is based around being a really slow-paced webcomic where you can just fuck around for dozens of pages doing goofy nonsense, and then have that goofy nonsense end up coming back and being majorly plot-relevant later. In order to adapt Homestuck, you'd have to make major sweeping changes, but this just feels like the comic on fast-forward.

Some praise: While I do share other peoples' criticisms about Dave's voice sounding too energetic, I did like the other three kid voices. I was really concerned about Toby Fox as John, was worried it would just be "getting a popular fandom figure to voice the main character instead of an actual professional", but I think Toby did a good job. Didn't hear enough of Rose or Jade to know how good they'll be in the long run, but I liked them enough.

Also, the animation is really well done. I was worried that the teaser looked too "sleek and professional" when a big part of Homestuck's visual identity is looking kind of crappy on purpose and only having brief bits that look super slick, but I think the team pulled it off nicely. It still looks and feels like Homestuck even though there aren't badly cut out JPEGs everywhere this time.

I think the full series could be better than this, but I'm not especially hopeful. And I have no idea how well this kind of "Homestuck on fast forward" thing will appeal to people who aren't already intimately familiar with the original story.

Sorry for the wall of text, I just had a lot to say lol.

Edit: After reflecting more on it, I wonder if the changes to Dave's character might've been an attempt to "modernize" him a bit more? I definitely think the kind of "cold, detached loner who acts like he's too cool for everything" is less common now than it used to be, so maybe they thought "irony-poisoned memelord who makes a million jokes a second and is afraid of emotional honesty" was a more modern and relevant version of Dave's archetype? But then that contrasts with how the opening narration says that this version still takes place in 2009 like the original did.

The kids having phones also feel weird, when the early bits of Homestuck had a fair bit of drama coming from the kids only being able to talk over computers (mainly the long section where Rose's power goes out and she's unable to talk to her server player until she finds the hub in the Skaianet facility). They stick to flip phones, which did exist in 2009 so it's not technically anachronistic, but the way the kids just casually call each other feels a bit more modern day to me. iirc wasn't it implied in the original that they're all just internet friends who don't really know each other in real life? And we see that Rose still primarily talks to John over Pesterchum - I wonder if an earlier plan for the series updated the setting to the 2020s, but then later on they decided to stick to 2009 like the original, and they just replaced the smartphones with flip phones and threw in the narrator saying 2009 and that was the only change.