Sort was going to post this in the S7 thread, but it's sort of off topic
YARLY!
I mean sure, he took some really creative (and strange) liberalities with his fillers in the original YGO! anime, but do recall that none of that really amounted to anything other than ''side adventures'' that you could skip at leisure and not miss a thing. Furthermore, it was within the realms of the setting (kinda :P) so at the end none of it really had much of an impact on the overall tale.
I mean yeah, at times the anime was more interesting and straight out better than the manga, but generally the changes he made didn't really alter much from the story.
Unless we bring up GX or 5D's