I fell it was OK. But it was rushed, and to many story lines that could have been, but were never wrapped up. MC's writing was fantastic, and the show could have gone so many places. And yes, Trip's death was not needed. The books cleared that up, but still...
Enterprise was a ridiculous 4 year long mixed bag of good and bad. I thoroughly enjoyed large swaths of it. TATV seemed such a wimpy, petulant way to say good bye (Trip dying, the "retrospective"). Almost as if they were say F you to the fans who didn't support their uneven, deeply flawed show. As if the show deserved to be watchd because it carried the ST brand label.
As far as Seasons 1, 2 & 3 go, I think they were better in the books than on the actual show. I read the books before I had ever seen an episode of Enterprise (I had someone tape 6 episodes in Season 2 and 6 episodes in Season 3 on VHS from satellite years ago, since there was only 1 channel on my cable service that carried Enterprise, and it wasn't worth getting the package for just the one channel back then, and really I couldn't believe that any of those 12 episodes had managed to make it past the brainstorming stage, when the books were painting a very different Enterprise), so when I saw Broken Bow on DVD for the first time, I was very disappointed at how the quality of the episode didn't even match up to what I was expecting from the novelization, or even By The Book, Surak's Soul (although What Price Honor I would have to say was as bad as the actual episodes) and the Daedalus/Daedalus' Children duology. In some ways it would've been better had the producers gone in the direction that Michael Jan Friedman postulated about in Starfleet Year One.
Personally, I skipped TATV and skipped straight to Star Trek 2009 and Into Darkness. Enjoyed the little nods to ENT. Much happier this way.