The AIDS mistakes do seem distracting to me. I was 10 in 1983, and all I heard about the disease were from these sources:
-Eddie Murphy (not helpful)
-News (informative, but also fed into scaremongering)
-Doctor friends of my parents (blunt talk about safer sex practices with 10-year-olds may seem inappropriate, but it made an impression on me when I finally got to have sex...7 years later)
Point is that for all the show gets right, it failed on this front.