Pretty sure he was just playing with Maximus and he knew he was new to the armor.
He also appears to be loading different bullets in that last episode that he may not have had when fighting Maximus.
Those were my thoughts exactly.
When fighting Maximus he even made a comment about "reading the manual" from memory, which indicates he knew that the person he was up against wasn't a major threat, and then in the last episode he both knew what he was facing and prepared for it accordingly.
Even just seeing how he fought Maximus vs the other people in the early episode indicated that he wasn't dealing with him as a real threat, as he quite happily shot everyone else, but was like a cat with a mouse with Max who he could say was clumsy and without distance weapons.
I'm absolutely fine with editing the episodes down to what they want rather that forcibly having to cutting it down to a set time and losing things they want in the show. With it being a streaming series they don't need to have a certain runtime.
I didn't even notice the difference lengths tbh.
Yup
It's interesting watching DVD versions of some TV shows where they'll sometimes add in bits that were cut out due to run time, and the commentaries have the director and crew saying things like "yeah we had to remove 10 minutes of stuff because of the length, and we hated doing it so we're glad to put back these bits that add some context for the next episode/background of the characters".
I think it was How I Met Your Mother had multiple instances of that, where they had to remove some good content from an episode because they'd allowed for if a joke/scene was flat with the audience but ended up with everything working and it being too long so the "non essential" (but still good) stuff had to go.
I really like the idea that an episode is however long it needs to be within a reasonable time range, as whilst you might be able to shift a scene from one episode to the next it doesn't always work as well, or it means you then push the problem forward and it gets worse. IIRC one of the ways some shows work around it to a degree was to basically try and fit it into the end credits (giving an extra 60-90 seconds).
