I really like what the new team is doing with HS2. I didn't mind the early stuff (it still has some of my favorite pages in the entire comic), but it was definitely a bit clunky at times. Ironically, my biggest beef with early HS2 is I felt like it kind of ignored some of what was set up in the epilogues, which a lot of folks weren't a fan of. It feels like now they're pulling more from the plot resources they have to give the story more momentum.

Regarding the epilogues, I would say that they're pretty bedrock to beyond canon. Funnily enough, I'd actually fallen of the HS1 train towards the end as I was starting college and just Absolutely Did Not have time for the number of threads the story was juggling and mostly just skimmed the last year or two, and similarly when the epilogues dropped I was in the busy end of the the most hectic months of college and absolutely did not have time to read a homestuck book. It was only a few years later that I decided to come back and give the epilogues another chance despite how many people were complaining about them. What I found was that the epilogues are convoluted, dry, dark, not especially fun, and exactly my shit. I love the epilogues. I love what it does with the characters. I love what it does with their relationships. I love watching what the characters do when they have quite literally lost The Plot.

Homestuck 2 doesn't really feel like Homestuck 1, and I don't think it should. These kids aren't kids anymore, they can't act like kids anymore. You can't be a hero in a story that doesn't need one.