the beginning is quite a slow burner, for example with many simple actions, like picking up a cake, taking several pages longer than you'd think. this, along with all the problems john encounters with the sylladex, are humorous to most fans, but to new people it can be confusing at best and downright frustrating at worst, possibly leading to exhaustion and giving up on the comic. over time this will only get worse as the average attention span decreases. I can speak to this myself; it took me putting in the initial commitment of installing the UHC to get me to read more than 30 or so pages.

the comic is also quite inaccessible, with the official website constantly having problems and the best way to read it being downloading dozens of gigabytes of files and a special executable to your computer (keep in mind most young people use phones rather than computers these days!). then again, homestuck is best enjoyed if you're a nerd who lets out an excited girlish scream at the thought of things like user interfaces, data structures, and programming language syntax.

I also want to bring up the CD rack on page 31, I thought that at this point the story had taken a non-linear turn and that every green CD (which turned out to be previous MSPAs) were required reading, which was frankly quite off-putting and overwhelming.

I don't think the use of the r-word is too consequential. it may put some off, yes, but I feel like most new readers would simply overlook it, considering this monolith of a webcomic started in 2009, when use of the word was more normalized.

regarding the troll session, I don't think you should be adding to it. maybe even removing some parts could be in order? redoing the entire intro sequence ("your name is blah, your interests are blah, here's more long winded actions sometimes leading to frustration" for each character) three(!) times throughout the entire comic (beta, sgrub, alpha) can easily feel like too much. this is actually one of the gripes I had with the recent HS:BC updates, throughout pages ~800-819 I was thinking "enough of the tired old gags, can't we just get to the new stuff already?"

on my first read, I also had trouble making it through the first intermission. i can't really tell you why, maybe I just felt like it was a confusing waste of time that had nothing to do with the story (but that couldn't have been more wrong, could it)