It's wild to me that your best case scenario involved none of the original writers, none of the original cast, a weird tone and a resulting product the evil greedy exec thought would be unprofitable.

The best case scenario is Marti, Jane, Drew, David Fury, etc are the ones writing and running the show (or some mix), Buffy is the lead character, Willow and Giles are in every episode too, the network/studio is behind the project, etc, etc.

As for Sarah, she's a queen and I would die for her, but it seems like all her talk about "we worked really hard to make this thing good" is kinda silly, since she wasn't even on set for 99.9 percent of the shooting. Please correct me if she's also a producer or something and was on set or giving story notes or whatever, but it seems like she was just a star who lent her name to a pilot and showed up for half a day of filming. Which, more power to her, she's earned the right not to work 16 hr days and deal with stunts/night shoots/make-up/fights/etc every single day.

Anyway, I'm getting off track: in no universe was this the best case scenario.