Really glad to hear that you are liking the show, Lauf! Yeah, the CGI was not very good (really bad at times, which is sad because of how great the animatronics were in the first, second and fourth movies), but the cast and the stories made it so much fun! And yeah, I feel that they handled the non-Graboid episodes very well, too.
One thing, it seems like you are watching the episodes in the airing order rather than production order (like with Firefly, they screwed up with the order of the episodes on TV, but corrected it for the DVD release). It doesn't make much of a difference which order you see them in, but the Mixmaster stuff in Ghost Dance would have made a bit more sense if you saw Project 4-12 first.