Setting aside Astral Ocean for a minute, we can all at least afford to write off the movie since it has absolutely nothing to do with Eureka Seven at all. It's a completely different story that's wearing Eureka Seven's skin for convenience. And while lifting unrelated casts and putting them into a retelling of a mecha show worked twice for Imagawa, Pocket Full of Rainbows really, really doesn't.
That said, my God the sequel was bad. Show was like a list of things Eureka Seven didn't need. Like, "Hey how about we put a white haired pretty boy!" "What if we gave Renton a gun?" "What if we did time travel!" Beyond that, though, it flagrantly ignored several important plot points of Eureka Seven to make its plot happen, and then half the plot threads in the show collapsed into nothing as the show went on.
I realize you're not really defending Astral Ocean and I don't want you to think I'm jumping on you but man, if I could name one anime I wish didn't exist, it'd really have to be that one, haha.