I did not like the show when it first came out but it got much better upon rewatch, the secret is having the right expectations, specifically, Freyja is the protagonist and no one else. There will be no triangle love either, it's just a Freya story about becoming a member of the Walkure to protect peace in her own way.

You are certainly not at fault for thinking Hayate might be the protagonist and there might be some kind of romantic struggle with Mirage, the show and all its promotional material are falsely advertising it and ultimately do not deliver. But I still have to argue the Freyja part is very successful and make the show worth watching.

Freyja is a teenage girl running away from an arranged marriage to pursue a career in singing, or specially "tactical live" singing on the battlefield to take advantage of the magical powers of song established in the Macross franchise. Unfortunately her home world planet happens to have a gripe with the New United Nations and declares war, so now Freyja is essentially a "traitor" fighting for the opposing forces. She must navigate between her dream of singing, romance with Hayate a plot for the opposing military faction, living up to the standards of being a Walkure, ending the war, and finally dealing with the fact that her race of people have a significantly shortened lifespan. I think it all ended up being a great case for the beauty of living life to the fullest you can, despite any misfortunes or limitations.

The idol group Walkure consists of 5 colorful characters. Kaname the veteran leader/manager of the group, she has a small romance plot in the show. Mikumo the mysterious but very talented singer and newest member before Freyja, she will have a conspiracy plot in the show. The other two are implied to be lesbian couples Makina and Reina, talented mechanical engineer and hacker respectively, on top of being idols, unfortunately don't get as much development. Again I thought this group of characters work really well together and their relationships really resonate with the plot well.

but now comes the bad parts.

When the show came out my expectations were sky high coming off of Macross Frontier and I particularly had a crush on Mirage, her character design is just so cool. Don't make that same mistake because she is only somewhat connected with Hayate who as I said before really is only a love interest for Freya. The squad leader guy Arad, because Frontier had a squad leader guy right? I don't know why Arad is in the show, he does nothing except reveal some exposition for again, just Hayate.

The antagonist faction also has a full cast of guys when the show already has a few unnecessary characters. The Aerial Knights is a squadron of 6 pilots, all of them are named characters, at least 2 of which I'd argue are redundant. This brings us to another problem, it feels like the entire antagonist nation, is just 6 fighter jets, and they battle against 4-5 jets on the protagonist side. Technically you do see other "normal" military units but they're just so inconsequential, in fact in the very 1st episode you see this one antagonist guy the White Knight, he come in by himself and blows up the entire planetary defense force in an instant, his relative importance compared to the regular soldier, is just absurd.

I will point to another detail that should hopefully highlight the lack of excitement in these space battles. In all previous Macross shows, shooting the Macross Canon is surely a spectacle, there's going to be a very long buildup, you get a spectacular beam special effect after some dramatic shots of the captain ordering to fire, and BOOOOM everything blows up in the path of the beam. This is true even for the miniature Macross Quarter in Frontier. But here in Delta, would you believe it, when they finally fire the Macross Canon half way into the show, it does NO DAMAGE to the enemy, other than making some consoles explode. Sure they have some techno jargon to explain how the bad guys blocked it, but who cares? We wanna see big gun blowing shit up, and it just doesn't happen. Likewise with the VFs themselves, they keep saying it's more advanced with better specs, and you see they have lots of guns, but the laser pea shooters just don't have that impact you previously had in Frontier and Macross Zero.