I think I might like Toradora a tiny bit less than you, but apart from that, I'm surprised to agree with pretty much everything you've said on these particular titles. I didn't watch Akuma all the way through though, I figured it was trash about 2 minutes into the first episode and dropped it without looking back.

Yeah, I would've dropped it if I could, but others at my weekly anime insisted.

Although your friend is right about Kishi, it's pretty much AoT in space in terms of premise.

There are two things that I seem to value more than other people: coherency of the setting, and animation quality, and both of them are areas where I think Sidonia is far ahead of AoT. The setting of AoT is ludicrous enough that I can't apply logic to it; the big reveal at the end of the series didn't make me go "ah" but rather "wtf, that's dumb". Sidonia doesn't stretch my suspension of disbelief anywhere near as much; the materials science that would produce something that could stand up to planet-busting weapons is a bit implausible, but not too much. We've been able to predict things that happened later in the series by thinking about the setting. On the animation front, Sidonia's may well be a budget-saving measure but it looks different rather than AoTs excess of still frames, which just looked cheap.

There's some similarity sure, but the differences are significant, at least to me.