That was kind of the point, wasn't it? The show takes place during the Dark Times. It wasn't supposed to start with a high note. They established the Empire on Lothal and how it affects people's everyday lives. Ezra, I found, was a tad bit too whiney for a bit too long, but his relationship with Kanan is definitely the high point of the show. I only wish Hera would get some more screentime. She's my favourite out of the main cast and I think she has tremendous potential.
I personally found the Clone Wars quite off-putting if I am to be honest with you here. During its run, it retconned way too much material that I'd grown to love from Dark Horse's Republic comic series. I was also tremendously aggravated by their treatment of Asajj Ventress, and to this very day, I still consider her to be a Rattataki, not a Dathomirian humanoid. In the wake of Disney's buyoff, I was forced to retool the way I view the timeline in its entirety, and my current headcanon is a sort of hybrid between the official Lucasfilm canon, and the old EU timeline.
I never cared much for post-RotJ material, so I'm somewhat okay with the new films overriding the Yuuzhan Vong War and the Second Galactic Civil War, but as far as pre-original trilogy stories go, I still consider all of that to have happened. Knights of the Old Republic, Tales of the Jedi, and the Darth Bane Trilogy, amongst other things, are just way too engaging to be simply discarded because of the way the Mouse conducts business.