I mean, a lot of the storylines could've worked if the execution was better, but of course there are stories that just wouldn't work at all (ie the Haleyville mess). The basic premise of the Ewing son being kidnapped might be similar, but that's about where the similarity ends.
I think the Haleyville storyline still would have worked, it’s just a matter of execution and the resolution. At the base, the story is similar to the one in season 2 where we find out that J.R. and Ray used to go cruising in small towns, picking up local women for one night stands, and that’s what J.R. was doing here with Callie. And just like in that earlier episode, sometimes that behavior comes back to bite him. Or that other episode where Jock and the boys went hunting in a small town and ran into those guys who tried to kill them. So the problem wasn’t really the story it was how it was handled. The early J.R. would have not just tried to let all that go after he got back home. He would want his revenge, at least on Callie’s brothers, the sheriff, and the warden of the prison he was in, if not the whole damn town. I could see J.R. buying all the land in Haleyville just to evict everyone and have it paved over for a large shopping center or something, or maybe buying up the local water rights, and letting the town dry up and burn.
And this is the case with a lot of the reviled stories from later seasons. The problems weren’t the always the plots, sometimes it was just the execution, particularly because they got rid of a lot of the veterans in favor of younger actors who weren’t as good. Like, c’mon, who didn’t want to see Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden together on screen again? The idea of bringing her on for a story where she plays an ex-mistress of J.R.’s who comes to town for revenge is fine, it’s just that the revenge plot was stealing Ewing Oil out from under him, which was already lame because they’d been hot-shoting ownership of the company too much by then, and then after she succeeds she leaves it to Michelle Stevens, some young gold-digger with zero business experience. All that was just stupid. And I’ll always maintain that the
idea of James Beaumont was a good one, giving J.R. an adult son that he could have storylines involving the oil business with, since John Ross was too young (if Dallas had been a daytime soap, they would have just quickly aged John Ross to adulthood, like they often do with kids), it’s just that Sasha Mitchell was not the best man for that role.