It appears that even The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya's masters at Kyoto Animation weren't all confident about making the show's currently-running "Endless Eight" story arc, if an interesting Q&A is to be believed.

Posted on the series' official blog, the interview is between the blog's host "Kuroneko-man" and unnamed members of the production staff. It was implied that the process of making the infamous story arc was that multiple teams were given the same subject material (i.e. scripts etc.) to work with, and were made to construct an episode. The result was a series of episodes, each essentially the same but with differences in pacing, tone, visuals, dialog, etc. The staffer s felt that it was quite interesting to see other teams employ the same material and the diversity of the resulting work, and that the project "broadened their outlook" on the show as a whole. 

Tongue firmly planted in cheek, the interview also seemed to acknowledge the largely negative fan reaction, with both Kuroneko-man and the staffers themselves admitting to empathizing with character Yuki Nagato who during the arc could remember every iteration of the Groundhog Day-like time loop, ending up with 594 years worth of boredom.

As a viewer, I have to confess that I found Endless Eight quite interesting the first couple of times, mainly for the reasons detailed above. As former director Yamakan noted however, eight effing episodes is far too much, and it's very bad form on KyoAni's part to treat their audience as something of a drafting board. I certainly doubt that they expect people to buy the DVDs, especially not at Japanese prices . Here's to hoping that they can do something truly awe-inspiring with the five installments they have left. I mean, they managed it in the original, so there's still a chance, right? Right?