I think a lot of the reasons many people don't like the Buu saga as much as earlier Dragon Ball Z is that they've only seen the stuff that was in the US and never watched old Dragonball, and they didn't really expect or accept the goofier tone, and the parts were Toriyama is actually clearly making fun of his own earlier DBZ stuff and tropes.
I think I'm a big outlier in that I prefer the Buu Saga to most of the rest of DBZ, but I live in Taiwan so we got all the Dragonball Material and Akira Toriyama's earlier manga translated officially so I kinda grew up with Dr. Slump and the DB manga, so Buu felt like a nice return to early Dragonball form, especially after how serious the Cell Saga got.
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