That said, Neuromancer is a book that's more "cool" than good; Gibson is very good at painting pictures with words, but story itself is something of a convoluted mess. Hopefully an adaptation can give the writers a chance to smooth out the elements that don't work.
There's nothing for people to follow or root for, the characters are just vehicles for the story, they don't grow or have a much of a personality.
As a voracious reader of Asimov/Clarke/etc. as a kid, I can confirm that your description fits a depressingly large fraction of that era of SciFi.
That kind of SciFi is at its best when the ideas (which are often the only thing that really matters) are so strong, they carry it all — Nightfall, Rendezvous with Rama — and at its worst when it's a bunch of “just men sitting around drinking alcohol, smoking and congratulating each other” (God, I love that description!). Even when the rest of one of his books is good, Heinlein can't resist inserting at least one pompous character just like that, and I can never believe it's not him!
The more recent deluge of female/non-binary/asexual/etc. characters and authors in SciFi is such a breath of fresh air.
It's 30 parts. The acting is stilted. The camera work is strange. The special effects are cheesy. The pacing is slow.
I loved it. It was faithful to the source material, to a delightful fault.
That said, I don't know if I'd consider it enjoyable. Effects being cheesy is fine. But the pacing was very odd. Not sure if it was originally released on another schedule, but watching it straight through, the pacing seemed really odd. It started out fairly decent, but around the midpoint it seemed to keep rehashing things a lot more while completely forgetting about some threads.
I still applaud the effort, because it's not necessarily an easy adaptation, and as you say, they stick to the source pretty strictly. I'd rather a mixed but solid attempt than a complete rewrite to be more typical cable/streaming fare (which is what I expect from the upcoming Netflix version).
Also, I know this is common in reverse, but it was hilarious to see the C-grade acting from the not-Americans in the "war room" scenes. It was like someone reading from a script with zero comprehension or emotion. I was curious if they just didn't bother past finding a guy who spoke English, or if they wanted him to sound a certain way but didn't care about the acting since it wasn't aimed at an English-speaking audience.
The challenge will be updating it so that it feels fresh and non-derivative to an audience that has already seen "The Matrix". I wonder if they'll take the approach of renaming core elements introduced by Neuromancer like the "matrix" and "Zion", or whether they'll take the tack of keeping it all as written and leaning in ("see the material that inspired other sci-fi legends").
I (re)read the books while watching the show and yes they did some modifications, but I could see why most of them were made (the lack of intra-silo email for example) and there were a few choices that will echo into the later seasons more than I could expect. (Like people ending up in different places than in the book)
But I trust that the writers read all of the books before writing the first season =)
In fact, I've never even heard of Wool and never would have, most likely, now it's on my to-read list.
There's some stuff in there that's going to be hard to adapt, because it works in a book but not on TV, but I'm really looking forward to it.
That being said, I was excited to see Da Shi looked almost exactly as how I pictured him, maybe a little less grizzled and angular. And I'm embarrassed to admit the cover "everything in its right place" gave me chickenskin. I think the sophon countown looked interesting (scribbling like a fast etch-a-sketch, which is probably what it would look like if it had to travel the planet all day!), and the unfolded sophon looked pretty badass. I was also thrilled about the trial of Ye Zhetai, and the army of logic gates. Hm... i'm getting excited again despite my better judgement. The suicides OTOH looked gratuitous.