Wow lots of great posts here. While DYRL was an amazing film, I still have to go with the original series solely because of the story. To me, the movie is only memorable because of the story provided by the series. I wouldn't care about any of the characters in Macross if the only piece of media I had to go off of was the movie. The movie does have far superior animation but it takes more than eye candy for something to follow you from childhood all the way into your 20s and 30s. For me what made Macross memorable was Roy Fokker, how someone so seemingly untouchable could be killed off so suddenly (yeah the original Transformers movie had the same effect on me). Roy didn't make a very good transition into DYRL so naturally I'm going to favor the original series more.
One thing I am surprised at though is how nobody so far has mentioned the changes for the Valkyries between the two. For me the original series set the iconic standard for each character. Each character was normally associated with a specific model whether it was Rick's white VF-1J or Roy's iconic Skull Leader VF-1S. In DYRL, it seems like just about everyone gets a VF-1S and to makes things worse, the original VF-1S gets smashed to bits.
Oh and regarding the fragmented story in DYRL, I think this transition from the Saturn game would have helped a lot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5pEPj-Mb1M...=video_response