Yep he was a total badass in NCFOM. The hair, the lack of sense of humor and the overall grim demeanor was frightening. In Skyfall, he seems a bit too whacky for my taste. Half the time i didn't know whether i should laugh with him or at him. Given his background and his state of mind, i was kinda expecting him to become more threatening as the film progress but it didn't really happen. That was a real anticlimax for me. It would had been better had he operated mostly alone and tuned out to be a deadly duel of cunning and deception between 2 super agents.

You're not wrong about that. To a lot of people, this whole series is not the traditional Bond they've grown to know. It's why some people are calming that RC and therefore QoS are bad Bond films.

The thing is, the series has so far has been true to it's intention from the very start in rebooting Bond to a more different yet more believable agent in terms of possessing realistic human like behaviors. He gets reckless, he drinks to overcome his emotional and physical trauma, and he actually fails in his missions. For this to be possible, other things too needed to be tweaked or Bond will stand out like a sore thumb. This transformation can be hard to accept given how we're so used to seeing certain things like women, cars, exotic locales and gadgets over the decades. But these things can't go on forever or it will start to look absurd and irrelevant.

I reckon the new Bond films will get better with age as people start accepting it for what it is, not for what it's not.

I agree i love cars and the women in Bond. But with M being the core if the story, it may explain why they chose to minimize other female characters in the film. Especially when they were trying to make a strong case of M being the most important woman in Bond's life. And with the introduction of new characters like Monepenny, the new M and Q, there's very little screen time for anything else.