I've been rewatching Steven Universe, and a number of things have stood out to me

I forgot how early into the show Stevonnie appeared. And I love that everyone thinks they're amazing!

In the same episode, we get some nice foreshadowing for Garnet being a fusion:

Pearl: Nobody expects you to be able to perform fusion right away, steven
Amethyst: Yeah! It's really hard, even for us!
Garnet: Not for me.

I remember back in the day, people were saying "hey, you can skip most of season one, just start at the finale"

And I hated that advice - because the first season is full of great episodes.
The big thing I've really enjoyed from rewatching the first season is how they build up these mysteries and only *very slowly* explain them.

They don't explain fusion until episode 12, for example, and they don't talk about how the monsters are actually just corrupt gems until way later.

What this does is it gives the worldbuilding and the characters space to breathe - it allows us to get used to everything before giving us something really meaty to chew on, rather than just throwing all these facts at us right out of the gate.

I honestly think that only 3 or so episodes of the first 50 are truly skippable, and it's only because they add very little to the characters.

I have noticed for the first time that the devices in the kindergarten (used to make new gems) are shaped like viruses!

That's a really cool design choice