Some friends and I just finished a rewatch. This is the understatement of the century.
The show tries so hard to have something meaningful to say over its runtime, but never really gets beyond "War is bad, but total pacifism doesn't work either".
Every character's motivations and goals are always nebulous, and their interactions with one another are so overdramatic that it feels almost like an amateur stage play.
I always felt that if you developed the story underneath the simple dialogue the concepts provide a pretty good story. But this was in the transition period where a lot of animes were still treated as kids cartoons and purposely simplified their dialogue for a wider audience.
Something I didn't notice when I could only watch an episode a week: each gundam has like 1-2 battle animation sequences, so basically when there are battles they just swap the backgrounds and use the same animation lol