So after a night's sleep, I feel like I am ok with the concept itself and just disappointed with the execution.
For me Evangelion was never about the story. I love Eva, but couldn't give two shits about Seele or Gendo's plan or anything. It was about the characters and themes executed in a beautiful & at times bombastic style with great music.
My favorite scene in the franchise is the 5 minute theater live action bit in End of Eva. Where does a dream end & reality begin. The music, the direction, the writing. It's just an incredibly beautiful poem about themes of human interaction. And that the major decisions of the main character happen during the poem is even more stylistically perfect.
I don't want to say Eva was always style over substance for me, because the themes it dealt with of loneliness, depression, social anxiety, etc.. have very much substance and it had a lot to say about those themes. But the execution style was a huge part of what made it work.
The robots, the action, the yada yada sci-fi nonsense bullshit... I could toss that all
Eva 3.0+1.0 was really disappointing to me because it was lacking two things: 1) poetic style and 2) characters & themes. It felt like it was more focused on plotting and action set pieces. Mari fucking sucks, Ayanami starts to get character development but then doesn't, Gendo/Asuka are nothing but yada yada infodumps, Misato is horribly underdeveloped in Rebuild, Ritsuko even worse. Basically anything that wasn't Shinji was just paper thin and just plot plot plot or nonsense action.
Without the characters, and since I didn't care about the plot, when the final battle stuff started in the last 30-40 mins, by that point I was ready to just turn the film off because I couldn't bring myself to care about anything going on anymore.
And for my personal tastes, stylistically 3.0+1.0 felt completely off in style from every other entry in the Evangelion franchise. There's like one or two scenes that have some style like the beach, or the opening recap, but it's just so plain it feels very un-Anno and un-Eva.
It also doesn't help that for the first time in an Eva entry they changed the music style. Outside the opening recap there's almost no classic musical, gone are the happy/kiddy songs to violent shit, and instead we get....soft engrish jrock songs that wouldn't feel out of place in a Guilty Gear arcade mode credits roll.
The lack of interesting directorial style, the change in music (classical music was always a large part of Evangelion's identity), the paper thin characters...to me it was just a boring bland movie that was way too long. As much as I didn't like 3.0, I feel like stylistically at least 3.0 is closer to Eva's identity and it's also shorter.
I don't hate 3.0+1.0, it's just feels like a nothing movie and seems a bit sad that after all these years this is how Eva ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.