I was reading this article on vox. I think that is a good recap and gives hope.
True Detective's season 2 premiere was a new pilot. That's why it was so bad.
Not only do I fervently disagree with your view that this presents it as optimistic, but I strongly disagree that, in light of the content of the article, the title is meant to be something encouraging (i.e. the optimistic view that the title means it was bad by nature of being a pilot as opposed to the pessimistic view that it was a pilot which is what makes it so worrying).
The writer opens with the confession that he didn't like the first episode of the second season. He clarifies that it faces a challenge in being a premiere, and premieres are tricky to do. He then furthers that by suggesting it's basically a pilot episode, as nothing is returning except the name and writer which makes it trickier than a normal premiere. He explains that overcoming a poor pilot or premiere isn't generally a problem for television shows and one of the easiest problems to overcome.
However, his issue was not by nature of it being a premiere, or a pilot. His issue is that the episode had issues at a fundamental level which are irrelevant to it being a new start, or an opening episode. The problem is that the episode has absolutely no focus, and doesn't know what story to tell, a worrying sign for the future. It captures four vignettes, but injects no reason to make any of those compelling or original, and the promise that they will interject is not enough. They bubble with cliché. None of them, unlike the first season's premiere, have anything interesting, new, or nuanced about them. The writer hypothesis that this may be because in season one he was free in terms of the time he had to do so, to create the bones of the Marty and Rust story himself and ensure it was well-crafted and unique. He didn't have this same freedom in the second season and simply fell back upon cliché and tropes. He suspects that a contributing aspect is his absence of a writers room where people are constantly trying to out do each other and creative ideas can form; unlike in season one where he had time and Fukunaga, here he only had himself. The writer of the article believes that the episode failed because while the scenario itself is full of promise, the episode's writer (Pizzaman) has no idea how to bring it all together, tries to brute force it via a character study, and mostly fails completely.
The writer does believe that the season could pull out of the decline that is the opening, sure, but I came away interpretting the tite as saying it's the fact that it's basically a pilot that failed that makes it a particularly bad sign for the future episode of the show, not that it was bad by nature of being a pilot. Perhaps I'm just much more pessimistic though.
EDIT: Also, the opening, I agree with the complaint that the music didn't really match the imagery.
