I have mostly managed to catch up with the audition streams.
When they say they are being transparent I do believe it. I caught more of their thoughts on losing Sam, that it is a blow. He is a hard person to replace. His specific menacing presence and wrangling capacity is not something they are looking to replace at all. I think this is the right approach. They also acknowledge that Sam was great at resolving plots and keeping things moving with ideas. They think it will be a challenge to not have that asset. Great stuff frankly. I have the same concerns.
There are a few stray oddities like how Jet is really into Nick Fuentes and thinks he's cool, doing good things and expressing important ideas. Very retarded stuff but they had a working relationship and there is value to be extracted there I suppose. They still float the idea of having Nick on the show and it was a planned bit for Season 4 that according to Jet lead to Nick doing the Sam Hyde show instead.
Something that is interesting is Jet very pointedly mentioning Memphis Design, talking about ordering very specific colors for painting. How they are currently working on the set, how nice the colors in the kitchen are. They talk about putting so much work into the set again. Sounds to me like a Season 2 amount of effort is back for the new Season.
They sort of hammer home that Season 5 is going to be different, repeating that this is poop house, its not a show its a livestream, etc. They are also forced to break off from MDE as a crutch a little bit, given that they moved away and lack the easy access to a lot of the usual collaborators. I think it is going to be interesting.