Yeah. The fact is, I watched episode 1 before I started playing the game. I knew certain things about the plot, and I knew Higurashi pretty well (mostly the anime, but I have played a bit of the VN) but essentially I didn't have any experience with Umineko. And I loved the first episode. Now that I've played the VN, I can see what they left out and elided over, but despite the fact that it was rushed, I felt that episode 1 was pretty well constructed and paced, and that they managed to tone down some of the slow, boring bits and end it on a note which hinted at what was to come. I actually watched episode 1 about three times because I loved it so much.
Now, I have a little more criticism for episode 2 and 3, though I thought 3 was handled pretty well.
And I know I wasn't the only one. So I think DEEN is doing a passable job, balancing between VN readers and noobs, and trying to both compress the story and still make it work, and there have been a few missteps, but nothing deadly.