started the show completely cheering for utena to become a prince and by the end i was able to understand that "women does the shitty thing a man does" is not actually a worthy goal

I sort of did the same thing, despite now feeling like I should've known better. It forced me to think "if I can turn my brain off for media, in what other areas am I just passively accepting liberal feminist perspectives before being led into a similarly jarring conclusion?"

utena's mixture of obtuse and opaque symbolism with some blindingly obvious stuff

That's really the perfect way to put it. And then it blends that approach at times to lead you deeper, like the butterfly/chrysalis/caterpillar/leaf shadowboxes (probably not the most opaque imagery, but it's the example that comes to mind); by the time it gets to Mikage's backstory there's just a hand on the screen pointing to them. I feel like it'd be a really frustrating show to watch if you were committed to a "the curtains are fucking blue" approach alone.

Coming to it much later in life, watching Utena helped me understand my own experience of girlhood. With that late bloomer/second adolescence that queer people of a certain age can experience, my chronology of becoming an adult feels like it's all over the place. But as I was watching, I could integrate my experiences—from some of my earliest memories to things that happened to me just a few years ago—by superimposing them onto the characters into a somewhat coherent narrative. I guess that's just a drawn out way of describing catharsis, but...