In comments at Omo's, DMdm sez:

ef has going for it more than just skilled use of technical pens and photoshop. As Link says, it’s taken a pretty tired genre — bishoujo game adaptations, a genre that has never produced anything particularly good — and produced a powerful set of stories braided together to form different views of a single theme. It’s a bit like the way Nadesico used the powered-suit genre to look at different aspects of memory (personal, cultural (fan nostalgia) and societal (history)).

We’ve talked a lot about the visual trademarks Shaft has brought to this work, but, as Jeff said a while ago, that could just be lipstick on a pig. I think what makes the visuals work is the way the story is being put together: three intertwining stories, each reflecting on the others, each taking words from the others and using them in completely different ways (sometimes with almost opposite meanings (at least momentarily — a lot of that may get resolved in the wrap up that I haven’t seen)).

The above was merely smart, but then he just goes into intellectual Super-Sayan mode:

Sort of as a continuation on my Gedo Senki remarks, I’d like to think that directors are looking at ef and learning lessons. But no one seems to have learned much from Nadesico, so I’m not too confident in that respect. I suspect we’ll see a lot of text thrown at the screen artlessly, glowing characters, and weird color palettes, without the story (and interplay of stories) that ef has employed so well. [...]

Man I laughed so hard. It's a good thing that my phlegm is flowing freely now and the cough does not hurt as much anymore.

I am, however, unhappy that I have to rescan ancient blog entires to get these nuggets of wit and wisdom. I only ran into the above because I collated a link collection for ef. This man really should get himself a blog and not make me rescan random blog entries... oh, wait.

UPDATE: BTW, it’s a different “dm” from DarkMirage (thanks Sanri for the reminder).