Chris, buddy, watching you argue with yourself worries me. Is this healthy?
No, but seriously, this was entertaining as hell.
In any event, what can I say about DBZ? Well, if it was my first exposure to anime, I probably wouldn't have watched anything more. Thankfully, in the 80s, I watched a bunch of bastardised anime cut up and remixed and broadcast as American cartoons. And a few years later, people were like "hey, did you know these cartoons were broadcast in Japan and treated differently?" Except not as eloquent, because still in grade school. And later, I went looking for the source material. By the time DBZ was out, I'd been exposed to edited anime and unedited anime. Not to mention, by the time it actually got popular, I had an anime collection going on, even if it was only a couple dozen titles. So I watched this big thing everyone I knew was excited about, and was like, "meh."
DBZ seems like it is itself filler. I'm not going to say people are worse off for liking it, and I appreciate that it helped popularise anime in a new way and brought other stuff to our shores, and my DVD anime collection might owe a lot to that because anime was no longer as niche (as niche, people, don't jump on me!). But it's filler. I don't hate it. I don't think it's the worst ever. But it's not the best, and I don't think it's anywhere close.