You can reasonably argue for certain very specific parts of the old dub being alright and up to preference vs the Kai dub
80-90% of the most famous lines, speeches, battle sounds (attack names/powering up/firing ki grunts) are vastly superior in the remastered Z dub (Orange brick DVDs, I think, not the first run on Toonami).
There's a few instances of strangeness, because of poor writing to match lip flaps or something. Like Vegeta will drag out a word a little TOO much sometimes, usually before a rushdown. Other times there's just cheesy or odd, random dub changes which were always dumb and aged poorly.
Still, pick 10 cool or iconic scenes and compare them. Majority will be worse in Kai. I guess not unbearable, just inferior delivery.
but it does not mean the general quality of 99% of the dub wasn't bad-to-mediocre. Writing, direction, delivery are all easily better in Kai
I'd say a good chunk was mediocre, it wasn't perfect. The problem is the remaster didn't update Goku's lines for some reason, so some of his stick out as noticeably poorer against the redub. One in particular is when Vegeta is killing the Ginyu Force and he's like totally flat "hey Vegeta that bad mkay".
any argument to the contrary is delusional nostalgiafaggotry. Or nostalgiafagging over japanese dubs.
I'm not blind to the problems, I just see inferior shit like Goku's Kai SS1 transformation and everything about it is bad. The writing, pacing, delivery, the scream, even the music--dog shit. It's literally a bad scene in Kai, he's clearly overacting whereas it sounds natural in the previous dub.
FFS the first funi dub started as thrown together crap made as fast as possible with literal who's, some of whom never even did any VA work before.
Yeah, that was the initial dub. It's not just two, original and Kai, there's a (partially) updated dub prior to Kai and for the most part it fucks Kai in the ass. I think they changed directors for Kai and that apparently made everyone sound retarded, and they replaced actors with shit replacements (lol Gohan sounds like a girl just straight up).
It came to be because of some wacky shit with how partnerships between companies played out with the dub prior to that. It's exactly as bad as it would be, given the circumstances.
It came out pretty good all things considered.