Getting rid of Cottonmouth so quickly was stupid, Diamondback was a pantomine villain and they missed a trick by sidelining Mariah in favour of him.

It's also annoying that a huge chunk of the series was spent on trying to sort out Luke' injury when they could have dealt with that arc in less time and still have the impact it had before. Luke Cage should have been an eight episode series, there was way too much filler in the last half.

Cottonmouth was a much better villain, and the only thing that saved the latter half in terms of villains was Mariah and Shades who I thought was decent. I still found it watchable almost all of the way but I swear to god, the second half of the final episode is some of the worst written television I've ever seen, literally. To the point that I don't actually understand how it can have happened. The writing is bad... The dialogue is awful... The premise is stupid and unrealistic (for a superhero drama, even!)... I just can't.

I don't think Gao is with The Hand

The plot is all over the place and the influx of random villains and enemies at the end is just stupid. Bakuto and Davos were literally there to fill up a few episodes and (in the process) their presence managed to totally destroy the only interesting orginal character in Iron First. Colleen being part of the Hand is a crap twist that makes no sense and completely derails her character, it makes her look dumb and naive which she wasn't before the twist happened. Also Harold and Bakuto make Diamondback look like a subtle and nuanced villain, I'm surprised there was any scenery left by the end given how they were feasting on it and not in a good way.

The whole last episode with Danny on the run just felt out of place, like the writers ran out of ideas and threw it together by taking inspirations from the most generic sources possible. The fact that they presented Harold as such a threat to Danny when they fought was just silly, like I said before, the writers have a bad habit of making Danny look incompetent because they don't know how to balance out his powers. Even with one hand, Danny should have destroyed Harold. What the writers SHOULD have done was introduce Davos earlier, develop him, have both Bakuto and Harold killed off before the last episode and have the last episode based around the build up of bad blood between Danny and Davos.

Don't even get me started on the fact that Joy went from turning against her dad because he framed Danny in one scene to wanting Danny dead for some nonsensical reason in the next. It was eye rolling-ly bad.

The only good points were Claire and Gao and the writers made the same mistake that Luke Cage's writers did in jettisoning Gao (IE the only interesting villain) partway through, thankfully they had the sense not to kill her off.