Still, it would have been realistic to have the Yeerks screwing up a bit with their morphs. I kind of wished for a reference to some of the morphed controllers not returning because they were K.I.A. and they didn't even face the resistance. Which I could see is kinda what the writer was leaning towards in that subway-Rachel-taunting-yeerk-falcon-nothlit scene.
The whole 'Earth is a bad neighbourhood' thing was an Aniverse factor I was quite fond of, since early in the series. It's little things like this that made the series, to me... you know, and it's virtually non-existant here. It gives the impression that it's sacrificed for the sake of pumping up these 'grand' plots.
What about all the times the Anis hung for their lives, almost getting squashed as an insect or were some bigger creature's lunch?!?!? Are the Yeerks so advanced they're are immune?!?!?!? What about the Yeerks getting lost in their hosts' morphs?!?!
It also looses cohesiveness... I mean, there's nothing wrong or impossible about the James guy morphing all them birds in the Aniverse... it's just that the Anis always had a specific set of morph types and really stuck by them, like you said. To have James in red-tailed morph doing that crazy-like rescue, when CLEARLY, Tobias was more suited and perfectly capable of pulling the stunt, seems a bit dubious on the writer's part to me. Suspicious even of a KASU.