Came back to this after hitting the "random" option on an anime site and watching a few episodes of the show.
Just as weird as I remembered, seems to be a trend with this author. Starts off all right, lots of characters I like (and hate, which isn't necessarily a bad thing), good fights, and then suddenly it goes off the deep end and goes all to shit. Like the author spends all this time building a huge house of cards, then suddenly decides to douse it in gasoline and burn it to ash. Same way I feel about Air Gear.
Looks like I'm not the only one that feels this way, judging by past comments.