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was it worth it at all?
No, unfortunately it wasn't.
I don't know about other people, but I would absolutely
NOT recommend this manga to anyone. The only recommendation I would make is for someone to read the series up until the point that you did, actually. It's best to pretend it ended with Yuuki leaving the school. The manga after that point is one terrible, gigantic mess.
To avoid giving specific spoilers, I'll just say that the flow of the plot gets completely upended after the timeskip. For a manga that originally moved at a decent pace, everything after the timeskip is just a bunch of long, drawn-out nothing. Post-timeskip, there are literally 3? 4? volumes (it felt like 10) where Yuuki is locked up in Kuran manor doing nothing except rolling around on the ground and feeling sorry for herself.
This is the other part of the problem: the main character is butchered post-timeskip. She regresses as a character and becomes one of the most unlikeable main characters I've ever met. It's not overstating things to say she becomes one of the most hated female main characters in at least the past 5 years, possibly ever. There's nothing positive you can say about her by the end. She's Bella Swan but much, much worse. (The whole story ends up being a Twilight rip-off, actually.) It's just sad and frustrating to see.
Yuuki isn't the only character wrecked in the manga, the rest either get left by the wayside or become shells of themselves.
The biggest problem, other than the pacing and the characters, however, is the plot itself. Post-timeskip, it gets very confusing, very muddled, and by the end, there are so many plot holes and things that get left unresolved that it left the vast majority of fans feeling angry. There are a lot of people who have resolved never to read another one of Hino's mangas again. In fact, one of the scanlation teams left a pissed off note at the beginning of the final chapter, something to the effect that they wanted to Hunt Hino down because this was not how you end a manga. It was funny.
The final volume of the series is absolutely rock-bottom bad. It was semi-tolerable before that, but some very,
very bad story choices get made that really cemented people's hatred for the manga.
Now that you've been properly warned, you can go ahead and read it and it may not be as bad as I've made it sound. No one was expecting what happened in the final volume, so that's what made it feel like such a huge slap in the face. But if you know in advance that the last 4-5 chapters are going to piss you off, you may get less pissed and be able to laugh about it all?
