But Mei and Yuzu growing and learning from each other stems from the "dumb" drama?
The reason why it's "dumb drama" is because that drama never felt natural. They always felt like an obvious attempt by the author to give them a reason to interact with each other and it just didn't flow well.
The series has been getting A LOT better and I think part of that is because Saburouta has been improving her storywriting the past couple of years. I reread the whole series and I still think that the Matsuri arc is the worst arc ever because of how stupid it was. It still doesn't really make sense to me and I never was able to understand Matsuri's intention behind the whole thing.
And then that was followed up with the Sara arc, which was not AS bad, but honestly a waste of time. Saburouta really didn't need to immediately introduce MORE new characters just to get Yuzu to spring into action so the drama felt really overdone since we just finished a "stupid drama" arc.
So there were like around 10 really bad chapters that took place over 2 YEARS in real time, so it's not hard to see why it really soured a lot of people's opinion of the series and made a lot of people drop it. We get the reason why those chapters exist in the story, but that doesn't discredit the fact that they were just bad chapters.