Honestly? My biggest gripe with the DMC Netflix show wasn't that it was basically an AU fanfic of the original franchise, my problem was that it was a BADLY-WRITTEN FANFIC of the original franchise.
More power to fellow game-verse fans if you can enjoy it I guess; your taste buds and stomach are Sons of Sparda level. But the fact there seems to be no nod of acknowledgement of the source material genuinely rubs me the wrong way. It sorta feels like the aesthetics of DMC without the actual essence of it, and that the characters holding Dante, Vergil and Lady's appearances and names are parody actors.
And the most tragic shit, imho, is that they could STILL have done good with some of Netflix's premise.
Eva was more fleshed out as a character, since she had more screentime now. Giving her witch powers meant more potential angles to explore too. Introducing OCs like White Rabbit and demons as a people was a VERY bold move, but if handled well, the story also could have been like Lady's and Arkham's: a commentary that evil and good was not so clearly divided into demons and humans, that both could exist in either side.
Unfortunately humans turned out to be The Real Evil All Along and the demons were largely just victims of a genocide, which completely destroyed that nuance and message 💀
Also stripped Vergil of his redemption arc and character growth, since now it meant his actions in slaughtering humans was misguided but ultimately noble. Which, genuinely, what the ever-loving hell. His story was about a person being driven to do monstrous, inexcusable things because of his personal trauma and tragedy! Keyword being "monstrous" and "inexcusable". By making Vergil's starting point (and first appearance in the show) a protector of his people who targets soldiers, the optics of being an indiscriminate murderer gets lost (or at least muddied) by that justification.
Not to mention Lady's character arc and agency, which REALLY got removed by turning her into a hardhearted zealot and a government lapdog.
Where was the Lady who was hell-bent on stopping her monster of a father, but still shed tears for him when she found his ruined body in Temen-ni-Gru? THAT Lady had strength, principles and compassion. THAT Lady would have been a whistle-blower, or tried to sabotage things from behind the scenes the first instant she realised she was acting like and being used as an instrument to massacre a people. SHE would have been interesting to watch.
The writing in the Netflix series failed, because it introduced too many differing elements at once, and didn't stop to think about the ripple effects of those elements upon the world of DMC and how that would affect the story it was telling. More importantly, the script writers didn't carefully consider how they could use those changes to honour the IP and ADD TO IT.
Tbh, this whole thing reeks of an ego trip of a newcomer upstart stepping on the toes of their predecessors, thinking they could carve their own path and create an entirely new thing without paying respects to the original work. But that might just be me.
Tl, dr; Adi Shankar is a shitty commissioned fanfic writer. Not only that, he's a shitty paid zine project leader, one that affects other people's livelihoods and reputations with all the bad shots he's called. So yes, he deserves to have complaints slung at him.