I
just finished ep 23 of Darker Than Black... and so far it's let me down a bit too. It's good, just not as good as I was expecting.
As for Bleach, within 10 more episodes I'll guess you'll be hooked. Like, episode 166 or something. You
could skip the filler to cut down on how many eps you have to watch. A site like
www.bleach7.com has every episode for download, and they're all categorized by story arc and filler so you'd know what you could skip... though they tend to have slight spoilers in the synopsis of each episode...
Once you get up in the 190's you'll see the greatness of Bleach.
