Speaking as a huge fan of firefly, I'm not even gonna pretend that the writing doesn't have a very specific set of issues, and that cancellation might have saved it from becoming aggressively mid and boring.

If Serenity was more or less the intended ending to the season (specifically revealing the alliance actually created the reapers and are unequivocally villainous) I'm actually happy they didn't get to put that in the show.

Same for the Shepherd Book backstory comic where he was actually a brown coat double agent in the alliance, because god forbid we have to accept that your enemy isn't ontologically evil.

But the best criticism I've seen of Whedon is that all his dialogue has over time exceedingly forgone character voice in favour of funny quips.

So much of his later production's quotable lines are almost impossible to attribute correctly just from the lines themselves.