The manga was awesome. But the anime turned out to just be fanservice leaving out key events in the manga for boobs.
Assuming you and I read the same manga, I'm not surprised that yet another anime has cut out important tidbits from its manga counterpart, but I'm just saying. Maybe a manga that has a girl who carries a katana wearing a naked apron for no reason isn't exactly trying to aim for the Pulitzer. Just saying. HSotD came across to me as zombie apocalypse meets sexy chicks, no more, no less. All other elements in the series are tied to that central element. Whether they be intrigue, love interests, or whatever else. Not the other way around. And between zombie apocalypse and sexy chicks, it's not surprising which one the animators decided to emphasize more. Also just sayin'.
On-topic: These past couple years aren't exactly the most stellar in looking for anime that breaks from the mold. Fanservice/moe has fallen into the "sex sells" trap of mass production. Neither are fundamentally bad, but the increase in crap created with nothing but those elements barely holding it together has definitely not gone unnoticed. Japan also has this stigma for a good while that anime are for mass-murdering pedophile adult otaku, so don't expect very many series to break out of the school-setting/teenage protagonist mold. Also, there's the issue that animation companies are finding just about any manga/light novel they can find, regardless of whether or not it's good (MM! is a shining example of this), and then doing a piss-poor anime adaptation that will at best be concise but incomplete over a 12-episode span or at worst be fillered to hell over 26 or more episodes which indicates that we're facing a media that is going through a creatively bankrupt phase for most of its stuff. Even the generic stuff is showing little to no creativity, as oxymoronic as that concept sounds.
If you want to find a larger supply of representatives for each genre, I recommend just perusing through anidb.info one of these days and just looking stuff up. All known anime at your fingertips, with info on whether it was subbed, who subbed it, the series' overall rating, the subbers' overally rating, and so on.
One of my all-time favorite series is a quaint little sci-fi romp known as Seikai no Monshou/Seikai no Senki. It was very character-driven, which I believe to be one of the strong points for most good anime I like, even those that suffer from "Plot? What plot?"