Heavy Artillery

In fact, sometimes I think they've gotten a little too precious in assuming that audiences don't need some sort of narrative consistency.

Hear hear! I studied comics in college and one of the most consistent pieces of advice we were given when crafting narratives was to write to the "dumbest person in the room" for lack of a better term. (It could also be the most distracted person, or the person with the least existing knowledge of some kind of core subject matter, but I digress.) And while I think there's value in not spoon-feeding an audience and trusting them to arrive to conclusions on their own, I also think that writers and creators, particularly nowadays, can easily crawl so far into their own cleverness that they don't realize they're failing to achieve their overarching goal, which is to craft a narrative that appeals in some way or another to an audience of at least a certain size.

But I think that perhaps the writers felt they had to set up Winters right away as our main character as well as rush us along to Normandy as a way of satisfying viewer expectations.

I definitely agree with this point, particularly the bit about rushing the audience into the action as a hook to carry us through to the next episode. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about Winters as the main character, now that you've watched a couple of the next episodes, as well. (I'll drop a more coherent question re: that on the spoiler-friendly thread of the next rewatch eps when I have a moment, lol.)