One of the more immediate thoughts I had was about tone. RWBY is all over the place, and tries to be too many things. It tries to portray the world as a place that's on the precipice of collapse, with the Hunters and Dust being all that holds the Grim tide back. At the same time, it wants to be a shounen about a bunch of teenage girls at a magic school with lots of fluff. These two things don't really mix. It needs a retool there. Another is the whole faunus subplot. Remove it. You can keep the faunus, but no white fang. No more dumb analogy for racism. Just come up with a criminal organization to replace them. This would also involve a change of Blake's backstory. (Show and explore more conflict with the Hunter system and how it has affected society. This idea could really give more much needed depth to Ruby’s desire to become her mother. Say for example how we take the advice of the author intentionally poking holes into their world-building and making a compelling plot from it, like how My Hero Academia explores how Hero society is geared toward specific individuals and shuns others. This is shown in the Sports Festival with Shinso being put in the General Education course despite his quirk being very useful for capturing bad guys and how people telling Shinso that his quirk would be great for a villain.) The show's problem really is thematic coherence. Thematic coherence can give a story a narrative throughline, greater meaning to the character's actions, and staying power in audience's minds. And when the show hesitates on what genre it wants to be (highschool teen (romantic)comedy, post apocalypse, science fantasy, etc.), it muddles the water even more. I would make it a cyberpunk fairy tale: give fairy tale motifs a modern or futuristic spin, and use fairy tale aesthetic to make a cyberpunk setting even more unsettling. The presence of faunus, for example, calls back to the fairy tales, mostly fables, filled with talking and anthropomorphized animals. A corporate princess like Weiss still works as a modern princess, but now the corporation making people miserable and draining the land of its resources while polluting is both cyberpunk and also a fairy tale motif in the form of a bad king creating a bad kingdom that slowly becomes a wasteland, like Oedipus. The Grimms work as the scary antagonists of fairy tales: the Wolves, the Ogres, the Dragons, the Witches, the Wicked Fairies, even the Devil (like in Bearskin and The Girl Without Hands), so you could keep Salem. I also wants more emphasis on the broken moon, specifically taking inspiration from the fairy tale The Buried Moon. In it, the light of the moon wards off evil creatures, but when it is hidden or taken away, the creatures can come out in force and number to threaten the living. The broken moon will be linked to the lore of the origin of the Grimm and how to defeat them, but that's a long way off. But a show doesn't need to be dark to be mature, even if it has dark or serious elements, as The Last Airbender demonstrates. So I would also add a dash of magical girls as the closest modern equivalent to fairy tale princesses. And more than the setting, concentrate on the four main characters, developing them and using their backstory and character arcs to develop the world they live in. Worldbuilding in service of the plot, not the other way around. Speaking of world, do à la Attack on Titans and restrict the world to some city-states as the kingdoms and the wilderness. Don't completely copy AoT, so I am imagining something like
the land of Elyon, with the "kingdoms" being four massive walled city-states joined by walled roads. Walled and cramped cities add to the cyberpunk's aesthetic by creating an oppressive atmosphere and visually representing isolation, and they also force to focus on our main characters interacting with this setting. Weiss grew up in the highest richest levels of the society, Blake grew up in the lowest levels- in the slums, and Ruby and Yang grew up in one of the very few communities outside the cities. Oh yeah, remove the school setting. Fairy tales don't need high schools to work as stories, nor did The Last Airbender, so neither will the show. Huntsmen and Hunstresses are like the National Guard, holding jobs part-time (mostly as cops and bodyguards) when they aren't called to deal with Grimm hordes outside the walls, in the Dark Forests (because fairy tales like enchanted forests). Things like the Maidens, the brother gods, and Salem could have worked if they had been mentioned as either legends from the old days or the current religions of Remnant. It would have been a "the myths are real after all" standard reveal, though probably not all of was true or accurate. It's at least better than random elements being introduced late into the plot and the show trying to make you believe the characters have known about it all along.