OK, so you now officially phail at anime judgement.
You can't appreciate thorough character development, you miss the subtle feeling or intelligence in any given episode and declare it boring instead, and you apparently demand EARTH SHAKING DEVELOPMENTS way more often than it's logical to put them in a show.
Not every episode has to have some major story progression, you know, and episodes are only filler when the characters don't learn or do anything or grow in any way in them (and no, there weren't any of those in SnM). Anyway, you want craptacular filler? Watch Naruto.
Balsa doesn't kill people because she's seen enough of that already (and how to do you call a stabbity thing "just for show and tell" when she goes around fighting with it all the time?
), and Chagum manages to outgrow his annoying whiny reclusiveness over time (it is annoying at first though, I'll give you that
). Also, about the other 95% of people out there agree with me on this show, so you're in a decidedly tiny and weird minority here.
Dunno why you didn't like SnM, though. The pace wasn't really any slower than S&W, the visuals and music were supremely high quality, the characters were well-developed and had personality, and the fight scenes were maybe the best I've ever seen (ZERO reused animation 
). I thought the story and world design were great, too. The heck did you manage to find wrong with it? 
