People definitely prefer the RTL run to the Sat.1 one.. to this day, people refer to the year-long season 5 as the best season ever. Personally, I don't think so.. because I think a lot of the later issues started on this season with some quite obvious manipulations. Sascha wouldn't have won the season without help from production. But production value glossed over it. But people love the extreme divide in the house and the huge competitions, sometimes even outside the house, when people had to climb glaciers or whatever. And whenever you ask people what Sat.1 needs to fix, the answer is always: being closer to that season.
That said though: I think most people would agree that this year's divide didn't work at all. But that was coming down to the concert. Initially they only had two people in the rich house and didn't give them anything for entertainment. So you wouldn't get any content and people would be excited to move back to the brick shell. They've later changed it that more people lived there (despite there being only one bed) and people always moving back after a day, but the isolation is just not working out. It might have worked better with a shared fence.
It's a bit weird that they didn't see that fail coming... it happened on the village season as well, when initially only three people lived in the rich house. Besides, the number one reason to nominate somebody in Germany is "I had the least conversations with them." So I expect a lot of housemates didn't want to be removed from the group for too long so that they wouldn't end up being nominated.
Speaking of nominations: There has been absolutely no format this year and they've changed the rules daily. I think German fans didn't mind it so much in the past and I would still think that a lot of them don't see the issues with not having a proper concept for nominations. But this year I've read a lot more comments about nominations being a bit pointless with them being so random, which makes me happy. It's been really, really bad this year.
Generally though, people liked this season more than the previous two seasons.. people especially liked this year's cast a lot. I personally enjoyed that they didn't try and tell another pre-existing broken love story like the other two years when they had exes in the house and then forced them to talk things out. People also liked that it looked visually better on TV and that housemates were able to spread out more and had more areas they could retreat to and have private conversations. That helped with the live feeds, I think people enjoyed them a lot this year.
People want Sat.1 to improve their live shows though. Common criticism that I've read is that live competitions were too boring (although I think people are a bit too harsh. While not perfect, this year's games were a lot better than previous years), that the daily show bits are just different clips thrown together and that they have to over-explain stuff on the live shows all the time (e.g. Big Brother explains the rules for the shopping bit every single day).
A bit surprising to me is that people seem to be a bit divided on the hosts. I think they are the most annoying parts of the show. Not because they are bad hosts but the way they are made to host the show. Sat.1 and Endemol want the show to be a bit more like I'm a Celebrity, which has superbly written and some (for German television) highbrow jokes. There was a time when some artsy people or journalists claimed to only watch the jokes for the hosts. Sat.1 always failed at replicating that because they couldn't find good writers. And I guess their solution was to keep comedy but making it a bit more slapstick. But them trying to recreate arguments from the house or whatever is extremely cringe.
As for the back-to-basic approach with the portakabins: People were happy that they left the portakabins. I think they would have gotten away with it again this year, if they hadn't used the same layout for two celebrity seasons plus two civilian seasons (plus two very-short influencer events). Ratings this year were higher, but they were not significantly higher.
It might have been more of an issue for the civilian seasons than the celebrity seasons. People like the 2023 cast and most think that production ruined the cast because of the setting. There were basically three spots in the house: The table outside, the living room, the bed room. So you people all sitting together, being bored, don't have a lot to entertain themselves, might be hungry because of basic rations and thus not really energetic. Those have been one of the main issues voiced with last year's civilian season and that didn't work out for 100 days.
Personally, I think the show needs a bit of a creative refresh.. not having a budget is one thing. But you can still do entertaining stuff without a budget. A lot of the memorable tasks from international BB didn't have a huge budget. But they don't have anyone in Germany that could come up with simple stuff that is exciting. A lot of other reality shows make use of ideas from the BB universe, including some that don't really cost money. And the best German Big Brother could do for this year's civilian series was throwing celebrities in that you see in at least one reality show per year and having people cut grass with a pair of nail scissors.
