The Problem With Monty's Fight Scenes
I enjoy them a lot, before anybody gets angry lol as much as I enjoy the current choreography, I sometimes look up the older fight scenes just for the sheer hype of them.
That being said...it does (and has) introduced problems before. The thing about them is that, while the story acknowledges that RWBY and others are technically still novices, what we SEE is them fighting on par with pros, and when the pros or villains win, typically it looks less like "oh they're outmatched" and more like "they got in a lucky hit" (Weiss vs the chainsaw guy, for example).
There are exceptions to this! Namely Blake and Sun vs Roman and Yang vs Neo, but even the latter, when you think about it, may not have gone as smoothly if it weren't for the fact that Yang is EXACTLY the type of person Neo excels in fighting, and the former, as cool as it is, kind of makes Roman look weirdly overpowered (he should not be blocking shotgun blasts with a cane 💀). The opposite is also sometimes true: Blake gets in a hit only because there was a window of opportunity while Roman was busy countering Sun, or later in the train she had an advantage with dust cartridges to alter her semblance.
My point is that Monty's style made EVERYONE look like they were professional badasses from the get-go, and that can be an issue when it comes especially to assessing threat levels. I genuinely think that people would've accepted the idea of Weiss losing to Vernal because she was out of practice if we weren't used to seeing the team operate on what looks like their A-game even when the story tells us they're exhausted or not in top form.
Heck, back when Volume 2's finale aired, people acknowledged that the Grimm didn't feel much like a credible threat when Monty was allowed to go wild with making a badass fight scene where the Grimm all felt like they were being cut through like tissue paper.
I hope I'm making sense here and again, love Monty's style to this day, but I really think that the level of control he had over what happened in fight scenes led, however indirectly, to a lot of the confusion/irritation people have expressed when it comes to fights in later seasons. Obviously they couldn't have predicted they would lose Monty and the spectacle of his fight scenes is what drew an audience to the show to begin with, but to treat his fighting choreography as flawless and perfect is a little bit in bad faith to me...or at least too colored by nostalgia.