TransParent season three first half - hits and misses

Season 3 of the Amazon series TransParent is still pretty great - Seasons 1 and 2 may have been the best, most moving, most informative and socially significant series on TV in the past 2 years, and there's plenty of competition (People v OJ, Making a Murderer, Veep, to name a few) - but not quite yet at the level of the first 2 seasons. And I think that's because for the first half of Season 3 at least we've been consistently on a down note: Sarah and Josh are terribly depressed (Josh is letting his music business slip away, too bad because music has been a huge plot element), Ali seems supposedly happy but I find the older, super-hip poet-prof she's involved in to be a truly dislikable and untrustworthy character - it's really hard to believe in her professions of love; she seems to be dangerous and exploitative - the wonderful rabbi is a woman of constant sorrow in this season, and Maura is distressed about her body image and seems to be pulling away from the trans friend but toward what we don't know. The only upbeat character is the mom, Shelly - but she seems heading for a fall. The humor has been pushed aside, for the most part. That said - I continue to really like all of the main characters and hoping for the best for them; the lost turtle episode was one of the best of the whole series so far (written and directed by the creator, Jill Soloway), the opening sequence of rabbi in distress was surprising and good (though nothing could top the opening sequence of season 2, the wedding photos), and I think the character of Sarah in particular is becoming ever more complex as she wrestles w/ faith, acceptance, commitment, and her kinky sexual drive. On the downside, I think they did a lousy job with the Rita subplot; I won't give anything away but will only say it all would have worked better had they built up Rita earlier as a key, sympathetic character, and the Ali-hip professor romance is very unpleasant - I keep hoping she'll see this woman's phoniness and get her out of her life. I miss her former partner, the singer from Sleater Kinney (sp?) and from Portlandia, and what happened to Ali's research on the family history?