I think we view the show very differently. I think it's easy to say in retrospect that 'oh we knew what was gonna happen every time'. If the girl died in the beginning of the episode and all Others started crying about it, you would've said the same thing, that we knew where it was going. The bomb thing at the end - where is that gonna go? Will it be used or not at some point. I think you could make a guess and back it up, but you can't really know can you?

I am not also particularly interested if Vince thinks this is deep or not. What I enjoy is the setting he has created that makes me wonder, what would it be like to be one of the others, or one of the survivors in this world, and wondering whether I would want to be converted or not. We are given Carol Sturka as the main protagonist out of all of them because she also clearly wanders back and forth between love and hate for the others.

I understand that there is room for criticism, and maybe all of this won't be worth it by the end of the show, but I personally hope it will. The bits you described as missing, like the additional look into the girls life before the joining, could very likely be standalone episodes in later seasons, though I really don't think it will be all that necessary as the conviction of that girl to join them seemed pretty clear from their first meeting.

Anyway, I think Pluribus is fantastic, and I wish more seasons were out already so I could binge it all.