Oh yeah, I skimmed through that script once. It actually did use a lot of the events from the early chapters of the manga. I can even sympathize with the desire to remove the Shinigami. Sure they gave the Death Notes a reason to exist and someone for our protagonist to talk to, but they also followed a lot of silly rules that seemed to have been contrived just to make the plot work the way it did.
But what did bother me was that it looked like they were having Luke start using the Death Note out of revenge for the murder of his mother, to try to justify why he would do all that, while I prefer the themes of the original story that power corrupts, and it's the nice, smart people who have the furthest to fall. It's simply a much juicier story for the guy to become a murderer due to idealism rather than trauma.