I'm sure we can all spot remarkable moments of animation here and there over the 290something episodes of Z. But the show has hardly "fantastic fight animations" overall, it had the exact same thing I just saw over and over again in the ep103 of Super (already 103 episodes too much, right): repeated cycles of pictures at every occasion when the fighters are close enough and a festival of ki "balls"/shots when they aren't (often with a loop too, where the character's movement is repeated over and over again), supposed to make me think the drawings are fighting when they are actually doomed to some infernal loop. That became the norm around the Frieza saga if I remember right. Even the Jackie Choun / Goku fight that was clearly thought to spare the most possible didn't have this.
And if we want decently animated fights, we can still enjoy the first celebration movie that restarted the brand (the one introducing Bierus)
As for story development, i won't say anything. After all, Toriyama became a master of some sort in term of coming up with turnabouts/new elements that seemed to smoothly paste (at least at first) to what was already built. But some of them were still pretty sudden/unneccessary, especially toward the last sagas the editors/readership had a too strong hand on the story.
Now that the story is in the hands of the anime scenarists (and a fan for the manga), of course this trend becomes even stronger.
As for characters, it's just that we all came up with our own idea of them. Though, Goku has always been pretty simple and I 'm not sure to see how he was changed for this show. Bejita, on the other hand, seems to never have had his epiphany (last books/episodes, during final fight vs Buu) at times during Super.