About the controversial Freedom Kira vs Impulse Shinn, it looks like if Sunrise had already planned this fight from the series' start considering the first opening of the series. Episode 35 used the same animation but with a different background.
I think one of the reasons to which this fight causes so much talk is that in previous fight Freedom took no damage. Here we see it taking a hit every single minute. Not even Athrun could hit Kira even though they were using swords.
It's like if the budget from the previous episodes was so low they couldn't revise every Freedom shot to show it damaged. I think they overdid by giving such a dramatic ending to Freedom vs Impulse. They could have just damaged the mobile suit a lot without sword piercing the body and simply recover its parts and upgrade them to get Strike Freedom. But yeah, that's just an opinion.