Late to the party but here are my thoughts.
1. Liked the production values immensely. It is a very textured show in terms of look. It's a good middle ground. It's not ridiculously over the top "gritty", nor is it so slick as to have no real world weight what so ever. And still, it also manages to have a certain stylized look that conveys things.
2. Yes this episode gave us the incident that took Matt's sight but it wasn't a full on "origin story" despite being the first episode, and MAN, was that refreshing. It shows that not only as a Netflix show there aren't execs breathing down creative people's necks to spell things out as you would for a child, but also that the people in charge of the show do trust the audience to put certain pieces together for themselves and be patient to get the full story of how Daredevil came to be.
3. For the vast majority of the show the tone and the dialog all felt perfect. Serious, real life, but also "melodramatic" as well as having some sly humor. I will say there were a couple of little groans I let out here and there over some dialog ("Those Murdoch boys have the DEVIL in them", was... It was a little to precious let's just say) but since there was so much excellence elsewhere and the dialog in general was on point, so what if there was a clunker here or there.
4. There were SOME things that I wasn't in love with. And it's not that those elements were terrible or horribly detrimental to the proceedings... They just felt like they could have overall been better. To wit... Elden Henson's Foggy... As of this episode I can't say he won me over. It's a first episode and it's a shakedown for a while, I know. But there was something that I found both boring and annoying about him, which is a bit of an achievement I suppose. His dialog and the way they wanted the character to come off... As of this episode I just felt they and the actor himself maybe has no idea of how to make this character hold your attention. He's a little bit nerdy, a little sleazy (maybe just a hustler type), good at looking at and bending the rules. But no one thing stuck out, or made an impression and as such, I don't know... His performance came off as trying too hard or the character came off as trying to hard in some moments. But... For me this is a work in progress. My friend has told me that he had similar feelings at first but then the series progressed and he said Foggy is a big part of why he loves the show, so really, it's wait and see.
5. Deborah Ann Woll was a real strength as Karen, in that her performance and bearing were very real, despite her obvious Hollywood good looks. She really made you believe in this character and her fear in a palpable way. There is a sense of a person just trying to get by there, maybe a little lost even before getting herself involved in some terrible business. I don't know where the Netflix character is going to go at all, but those aspects are actually good to have if you are familiar with Page from the comics.
6. Point blank, for what this show is the fight choreography (and the use of wire work, parkour, and SFX to sell the fights and enhance them) is a good as it can get. This first episode had some totally improbable stuff, but it works in the context of the show. And I am happy that the fights have a good balance of indeed having intricate technique and good rhythm but also hard hitting and tactile. It is definitely flashy, no doubt, but also not pedestrian by any means as well. Seeing Matt go to the gym at the end was fantastic and hopefully they do that often, because what would be required to maintain the skills and physical ability a person like DD would, is usually glossed over in super hero stuff. Usually it's like, "He trained under the secret masters during that early part of the film... And that's all it took." I understand why that stuff is glossed over, but I think such elements can add a lot of depth and can get into DEEP character traits, if done correctly.
7. The presentation of the "underworld" was really great. Fisk's network, the jockeying crime lords, the way they BRILLIANTLY made modern NYC a place that DD can actually ply his trade in is fantastic. Sorry to tell my fellow Americans, but... NYC hasn't been the NYC of DEATH WISH and THE WARRIORS or Miller's DAREDEVIL comics run for a very long time. A VERY LONG TIME. Hell's Kitchen is actually quite Tony these days. So... How do you realistically get DD in business? How do you give him a milieu that evokes the sense of corruption and violence, the neo noir elements that Miller's DD had? Well, they could have just said "Eh, who cares? It's a comic book show. NYC will just be the same fictional NYC we've been feeding audiences forever even if it hasn't been a crime infested town with multiple murders due to gang wars and drug dealers on the street every other day since the early 1990's." But instead they kind of brilliantly used the MCU events to set the back drop of a NYC being rebuilt, and where such things happen you have contracts and unions, and kickbacks and corruption and organized crime and all of that gives you a way to explain certain aspects, like a novice lawyer living in Hell's Kitchen given NYC rents these days. It also suggests that the events of the first Avengers film really has left it's mark on the city.
8. Finally, I really appreciated the way that they presented Matt's dad. Not only was the actor fairly good (if a bit anemic looking to have me buy as a pro boxer) but they did a good job of not Knighting him with sainthood, but not making him some kind of cliche drunk dad or what ever Miller's/Marvel's retcons have been over the years.
All in all the first episode had it's bumps but overall was very well done, and hopefully the series gets more engaging as it goes on.