Greed was, for lack of a better word, good. Not outstanding, and it did have flaws, but with enough good qualities to be worth watching. It probably would have worn thin after too long, but I would have liked to see it get more of a chance to try to evolve.
Chuck was great. The Terminator was cutthroat (Bob Boden later pointed to it as the start of “meanness” in primetime games), but it was dang cool. They handled the spectacle of it without becoming a parody, the big cash prize felt earned, and it was suspenseful enough without being too slow or resorting to overly cheap tricks.
I wish they'd let players confer a bit more. The Captain having to make blind decisions without knowing the expertises of their players never sat well with me.
Millionaire is great cause you have a constant window into the contestant's thought process. On Greed contestants were not allowed to say what they knew and did not know, they were only allowed to say something like "I'm very confident it's Michael Douglas" on their turn, and then play passed to the next player. Why not let them say "I am 99% Michael Douglas won Best Actor for Wall Street"? When Chuck asks the captain "The next category is 'History', will you play for $500,000 or will you stop?", the audience all shouts for them to either go or stop, but the contestants can only stand there awkwardly in their split-screen trying not to react too strongly. What's the point of showing them on-camera if they're not allowed to react to it? It'd be much more interesting to show them trying to persuade the captain to go or bail.
Also, wasn’t a fan of the survey-based questions they relied on towards the end. Questions like "According to this one study, which four are the mostest..." aren't really fair questions in a game where you need to have all players "know" the answer or go home with nothing. No amount of knowledge can help in that situation; nobody can possibly "know" that for sure.