A lot of stuff is dark and a lot of sound is muddled. My hearing isn't the very best but I've sort of surrendered and just use close captioned for everything.
My hearing is pretty good and I am a native English speaker and it is shocking how often I need to turn on subtitles every few minutes in some new show I'm watching because I have no clue what was said even after rewinding three times. At the same time, I am extremely distracted by subtitles so I can't leave them on permanently.
The darkness problem is also quite annoying, though varies a lot by show. I just started watching Silo, and while I understand most scenes are supposed to take place in a pretty dark environment (inside of a silo), everything is just so dark in almost all scenes.
I echo the sound/dialog complaint for Andor as well. I think it's one of the few high production budget shows in recent memory that sounded like it was mixed for 2.0 audio.
Watching on my 7.1 setup was actually more annoying than watching on my computer with 2.0. There's a very obvious bass-boost as if they assumed there isn't subwoofer in the setup, and dialog didn't get any clearer with a dedicated center, it was still kinda floaty across the front. Surround channels just sounded like they echo'd the L/R channels.
I respect the idea that all dialog need not be decipherable (any more than it tends to be in real life). Incidental sounds/comments are okay as long as a key plot-point does not suffer (and you'd like to think they would make sure that was not the case of the more important lines).
If the most accessible surface content is already better than a normal show, then adding extra hard to access content, for world building and rewatch enhancements, is more than fair. Andor passes that bar.
