Re: confusion about events - I've been finding that a lot of non-ssss stories are far more sparing on how much is drawn. It's pretty smart to do that, but it can lead to readers not knowing how things happened and needing to backtrack a bit. Not sure if that's the actual problem, but it's a thing that happens with me so in my opinion that might be it.
Regarding Hale - he seems to be researching how to make familiars and doesn't actually know how to make a familiar like Leeds. I think he was a bit of an average kid at school but wanted to be talented by their standards or something like that. And by "their standards" I mean the whole writ vs gilded wizard thing. In the end, though, it seems like you still have to know spells and practice magic a lot to be a gilded wizard, as it's pretty clear that Percy does mess up a spell in chapter 4 and something happened along the way to cause that? Either way, I'm really looking forward to what the next season will be like!
The entire sequence where Hale sent them to some dream world - yeah, I agree, thorny, that was actually my favourite bit. It kind of seemed like both Leeds and Percy were helping Each Other at the very end, when she weaves the spell and Leeds is helping her with the bundle of sticks and all that. This story does centre around their bond a lot, so that's how I interpreted it. Also, I love the way Percy does magic, with her threads and pins and patterns, and the way her past/shadow self could form it into a sword... I'm pretty sure she was referred to as Chiaki, but yeah, I think it was a good way to show how Chiaki clearly took after Calbraith and became a ruthless, albeit powerful, wizard. I'm interested in if they'll explore that link in the future, though that sequence might be done and dusted.
About characters - Hmmm.... Percy and Leeds were definitely great and well-developed together, but I felt like the side characters weren't really given much depth... I'm not really sure if this is an unfair criticism or if I just have a very personal distaste for underdeveloped side characters, and I might've tuned out from the side/bonus stories, so maybe this criticism isn't much. But also it's neat that Percy had a lot of experiences probably specific to mixed Japanese people. It's always nice to see experiences specific to a group of people appearing in a story, though sometimes I wish that there were a story that explored this kind of thing in a lot more depth.
Miscellaneous commentary - The vague mentions of an educational institution that's actually a central part of the plot is really interesting to me because of the amount of school-centred stories that we get. I think that's partially because of the structure that makes those stories very conducive to storytelling, so reading a story about a dropout and how her time at school follows her around despite it all is a nice change in perspective. I also feel like I relate to some of her experiences a bit too much... not literally, obviously. Anyway, I hope they go into more detail about what it's like to be "out of school" in this context and I hope that I can still relate to how it's presented, because this story resembles some process of reconciling your shortcomings in school and accepting you can still be a person in spite of that.
Side note - I found it kind of confusing to just not have one long sequence of pages that were storytelling because halfway through, I'd get confused about whether I was reading a side story or a page of the main story. It's not a big deal, though, and doesn't take away from my enjoyment of the story at all. But it's also interesting because seeing various branches of the story or peeks into the authors'/characters' lives outside of the main plot isn't really something we got much in SSSS, unless you saw the bonus comics in the printed books (which I have not lol).
Other side note - the website's crow mascot is cute, but a little spooky because of the mouth in the abdomen :>