Personally I would've liked gun x sword more if they had dropped the 'remember we're anime' and just had a revenge story in a sci fi western world instead of robots.
Thing is, rather than a specifically western-oriented production, GunXSword was almost literally supposed to be the anime equivalent of something like Kill Bill except with giant robots instead of martial arts.
The revenge story is absolutely key, of course, but the show was explicitly meant to be sort of a homage to or "greatest hits" collection of what the staff considered to be fun about anime and all the super robots are quite integral to this (especially given many of the creators had rather mecha-heavy records).
Aw man, really? I remember Corvo got a real kick out of it back in the day, but how bad are we talking?
You may or may not agree with me, but I'd argue it's still a solid show with a few G Gundam-style vibes lurking beneath the surface (no surprise given the staff has people who worked with Imagawa on it), despite the actual narrative having almost nothing in common. To be specific, the main villain team is a highlight and the show does build up to a relatively strong finish with increasing amounts of focus, rather than remaining purely episodic (I am a big fan of the midpoint three-parter, which is where everything first comes together).
It's just that episode 3 is incredibly iconic -and deservedly so- given the (misleadingly) disjointed nature of the first half of the story. And yes, it would have been awesome to see an entire show about the El Dora V team, but I suppose the point of the episode is that such series had already become far too rare even back then.
