It's extremely tightly scripted
Hard disagree. The show is way too decompressed. Too many filler scenes of people standing around and talking like they're in just another Western live-action show, rather than making the screen time count with actual plot progressing stuff happening. We didn't need scenes of Victor going to sit on the ledge of a sewer pipe to pout, or the council woman painting some abstract art, or the half dozen scenes of the mafia guy sitting in his chair in the office stabbing his eye with a drug needle. The first 3 episodes feel like there is at least some vague sense of a plot with cops coming after the protagonists, but then after that the scope becomes about this war that never happens and you're going to have to wait several years for the next season to get animated before you get to actually see it.
Arcane also has a bad case of
Epic Fantasy Book Syndrome, where there are too many major PoV characters with their own stories and the show keeps bouncing back and forth between all of them, so you watch an hour long episode and overall hardly anything has happened. The show doesn't even successfully manage to juggle all of these major characters and their subplots, with some characters like Heimderinger conspicuously falling off the map in the last 1/3rd of the show. And the show is still introducing new characters and factions right up until the end. I dread to think how much of a slog the second season will be. Again, the first 3 episodes are somewhat decent because of their limited scope.