In your opinion, does learning with it indicate a low level, or that it just isn’t worth engaging with? To me, from what I’ve seen, all the annotated Talmud editions are about the same thing. Even though I actually do manage with a Vilna page and a dictionary.
I never understood why people say that someone who learns annotated Talmud will have a hard time moving on from it afterward. He basically only did one step for us—translated it into Hebrew.
Thank you for your time, Rabbi Michi! You’re lovely.

I don’t see a problem with it. It used to be more of an issue in the past, when there were tractates without explanations and then you needed to know Aramaic. But nowadays there are explanations and translations for the entire Talmud, so the importance of understanding Aramaic has diminished greatly. It’s always better to understand something in the original, but it’s definitely less critical.

At some point I bothered to read a collection of the various broadsides that were published against him.

And indeed, the main issue they protested was the mixing of academic scholarship into the notes, and other books by Rabbi Adin, of blessed memory, in which he described figures from the book of Genesis as human characters. (As for the protest against changing the page layout, I hardly found any mention of it.)

In my humble opinion, there is a gap between the different annotated editions.
Metivta really writes a lot, and by doing so pushes a lot of interpretation inside and “spoon-feeds” it.

Schottenstein does that less than Metivta does (and usually follows Rashi, if I’m not mistaken?).

And Steinsaltz writes less than both of them and leaves the most room for you and your own thoughts.

I remember that Rabbi Shach came out against changing the page layout.