Television

Gaal is a TERRIBLE protagonist, she should have been shown only in flashbacks as salvor or others tried to follow her to detangle the mystery of the second foundation. 3 main threads: empire (shown in grand Tableau as ozymandias), the foundation, merrily marching through 1 crisis to the next, and salvor/other, warned by a brief scrap of seldon's holo to find Gaal and save the real plan, and you learn along the way that psychohistory is half illusion, with mysteries upon mysteries about the truth and real threats.

Not too different from now, but it's like alien, cut your main star out of the film, it makes them more powerful, with gaal around we're just confused especially since she seems so utterly irrational. The key is seldon and gaal are only seen as scraps of legends.

It's a useful mechanism to introduce simple plot back story to explain an action or a choice but when it's used to tell primary story it largely leads to confusion. The Witcher used it too and it caused a bunch of issues. Ian Banks scrambled a books chapters and guides were written on the right order to read the book.

I don't know why writers like the technique so much since we are in time order beings and it's how our brains work and while it can sometimes be fun it's mostly annoying and often scrambles the story in the watchers/readers mins. I hate it as a technique for anything other than details that don't matter much.

Re-watching is the point. The series is amazing from the get-go, but it's only fully revealed if you re-watch it (or if you remember absolutely everything and re-assemble it yourself, which is nigh-impossible.)

You're not wrong : it would be great if told in a linear fashion, but it wouldn't work the same if they did that. It works the way it was done, it's just a bit taxing to watch because it's somewhat dense.