I think i've about settled on this series being completely meh.
If Thrawn is supposed to be some kind of genius mastermind, i'm not seeing it. So far all that has happened is him letting Ahsoka get away and thinking it was brilliant, only to have it backfire on him. Then when that Morgan whatsherface witch rightfully calls him out on having failed, he pulls the "nuh uh, see ackshually we really won when you twist things to make me look cool and smart, here's a pseudo wise sounding line of dialog so you totally believe me".
Sabine and especially Ahsoka are boring and have really poor dialog and acting. While I was never the biggest fan of Sabine or Rebels itself, she at least had personality and emotion in it. Ahsoka is particularly baffling though, she had a ton of charisma in Clone Wars. And while she matured quite a bit, she always remained lively and upbeat, even in Rebels. I literally don't get what happened to the character in Mando and this series. She's just so wooden and her one personality trait seems to be speaking with an aloof or bored snooty tone. I almost even prefer her obnoxious and bratty personality from the early Clone Wars era before she became an actually good character. Can't believe I'm saying that either because she was terrible back then...
Ahsoka also seems to have been nerfed since the tail end of Clone Wars and Rebels. Beforehand she fought and managed to defeat Darth Maul, a literal Sith lord who actually managed to put up a decent fight for a bit against Sidious himself earlier. She consistently made fools of every Inquisitor she faced, beating one of them with ease while completely unarmed in Tales of the Jedi and also making fools out of the others in Rebels. The culmination of her feats was her duel with Vader. He did outmatch her, but the duel lasted a long while and she gave him the fight of his life and even damaged his helmet badly.
This series is something like a decade or more after Rebels, so you would figure Ahsoka would be even stronger, yet she takes a lot longer to beat that nobody Inquisitor Marrok (that all the fans were laughably thinking would be important). And so far she has yet to be able to best Baylon, whom she seemingly admits she can't win against. Despite it making little sense given her prior feats. I can't fathom that Baylon is remotely on the same level of power as Vader. He doesn't seem particularly confident in his own power either, given that he's trying to seek out Thrawn to become the new Emperor instead of just doing so himself.
I find Thrawn's decisions to be perfectly logical. While other characters want to run around to follow their emotions finding and killing enemies, Thrawn remains completely focused on being rescued from a distant galaxy, leaving those possible enemies themselves stranded. If it wasn't for his deal with the witches, he'd be outta there already.
And all the while Ezra showed no intention of hunting and killing Thrawn, it was wise to let him be. Why would Thrawn expend resources to kill someone who just stayed in hiding?
Thrawn isn't a mustache twirling victim who screams EZRA!!! in the middle of the night for stranding him. His one goal: get un-stranded.
Because he should not be taking ANY chances with allowing even one Jedi to live. It is the epitome of extreme foolishness. There is great precedent in this franchise to demonstrate what the consequences are for doing so. Thrawn of all people should realize that, given that Ezra was the one who stranded him there in the first place. And he'll have been informed by those who came to rescue him of the events that happened with the empire in his absence.
Leaving just a single jedi alive can topple an empire. An empire infinitely larger and stronger than Thrawn's tiny remnant of troops. One led by a man who was himself far more powerful, intelligent and intuitive than Thrawn.
As much as I hate the sequel trilogy, especially Last Jedi, even Kylo Ren knew the massive threat just a single jedi was. Despite no one around him taking it seriously.
The sad thing is that Thrawn does start out taking the threat seriously. Especially when he's warned by Baylon and also the nightsisters. But he abruptly changes his mind and decides to not put the maximum effort in. And then after the jedi demonstrate that they are indeed a serious threat to him, he goes into denial and thinks he's already won anyway because "time".
It's also impossible to care or be concerned about his return because the sequel trilogy already exists. We know he's not going to have any real impact on anything, no one ever brings him up in any of those movies. Unless they make it so that his influence isn't felt until post Episode 9, whatever he ends up doing is going to be completely inconsequential to the franchise.
