Fuck the animes pacing, it's unbearable. Luckily https://www.onepace.net exists

Not for nothing, but the manga is paced much better and can be read legally, easily, and digitally for a $3/month subscription. Took me like a month and a half to read the whole thing.

You've made your opinions clear about long recommendations, so take it or leave it. You were interested once before, though, and it might be worth checking out.

Read the manga

This is my same thought with soap operas. Not that I want to but how would you even get into a show that had been running 5 times a week for 30+ years?

I tried to watch the ocean cut of Naruto, which basically edits each arc down, cutting out unnecessary flashbacks and recaps, along with intros and intros, making it into basically a series of films.

It's still 40 films worth of content and 3+ hours per film sometimes (I think, it's been a while), and the pacing is still absolutely fucked which is a symptom of basically every episodic anime when binged.

I had to watch the first 40 episodes on 3.5x and that shit was still boring. I dropped it after 40 lmao