I hated the bit where Jo was awesome and had an awesome life and told us all about it and then suddenly did a U-turn

YES, THIS. That pretty much ruined the whole episode for me, with the icing on the failcake being that Jo's family does such wonderful things that they apparently don't have time to be an actual family, so Rusty managed to both have an intact family *and* break it up.

I wanted to adore this episode, and I ended up swearing about it on my LJ.