I'm a Xena fan from way back, so the cheesiness of the production quality didn't bother me.
(Like with Xena, I was just distracted by the hot women. 🙂
Xena had better fight scenes, though. With LotS they relied too much on slo-mo and editing tricks to make the fights look impressive. On Xena, they were just constant full-speed action.
I liked picking out all the old Xena actors that turned up on LotS. It was like "Where's Waldo."
I'd sure like to see somebody do a version of the story that follows the books more closely, though. Even though the later volumes get pretty slow and preachy and full of people talking for 10 pages at a time. You could probably have each of the first 6 books be a season, and then compress the rest of the series into one final 7th season.