The majority of matches remain fait accompli but there was enough minnow magic to keep fans hooked. Where once the problem with World Cups was sustaining interest in the first month, to these eyes, the problem has now shifted to the second.
With that in mind, let's look at three ways Japan 2019 can be even better than England 2015.
1. The third and fourth-placed teams in each pool and the knocked-out quarter-finalists move into a secondary, concurrent tournament that has some form of automatic-qualification carrot to it.
At present, we have a feast of 40 matches in the first few weeks and an anaemic eight games, including the kissing-your-sister bronze-medal match, thereafter. The final few weeks can feel like three, long pregnant pauses with ludicrous weight being put on such revelations as team-naming day, when Blind Freddie could usually name 22 of the 23 in any given team.
A plate tournament would mean more logistical and cost challenges but it would also mean a) more rugby for broadcasters and sponsors; b) more meaningful tests for second-tier countries; c) the chance to take games to smaller stadia and locations; and d) a chance to blood the next tier of referees.
It would be easy enough to formulate, though there would have to be matches on short rest (there could be a rule to extend squads for the plate tournament).
It would also mean tour packages would be easier to sell if they were guaranteed rugby - even if it's not exactly the rugby they wanted to see.
2. Start treating second-tier nations with the dignity they deserve, both at the tournament and in between.
Much has been made of the indefensible draw disparities, apparent judicial anomalies and the lack of tours by big nations to small, but it is time to stop talking about it and actually make meaningful steps towards rectifying it.
Fifa might be a vile organisation that does nothing without the ulterior motive of a powerful few retaining a vice-like grip on the sport, but that naked greed does at least provide the illusion all countries under their vast umbrella have a meaningful vote (this column does not have the time to explain why that is, in fact, a farce), and they all have opportunities to qualify and succeed in major tournaments.
World Rugby creates no such illusion.
The haves and the have-nots are clearly defined by the privileged status of Six Nations and Rugby Championship membership.
The have-nots are asked to turn up every four years, try their best, be "bravo-ed" from the field and then sent packing back to the wilderness with a couple of crates of sponsored tackle-bags and two-days-per-year access to a resource coach nobody has heard of.
That might be a slight exaggeration, but you know what I mean. The tournament organisers are bragging that this World Cup will generate commercial revenues of close to $600 million and a surplus close to $400m. That's 60 per cent more than 2011 and significantly more than France in 2007 - so the game is growing, right?
Well, not really. Rugby's geo-political landscape still makes it possible for only one of 10 teams to win the World Cup because they're the only ones exposed to regular top-line competition. Until they rectify that, any claim World Rugby make about it being a massive global tournament is a manipulation of convenient metrics.
3. Sort out the rules, including those around the use of the TMO.
Rugby doesn't need to apologise for being the only sport where the interpretation of the official can affect the result of the game, which is why I often cringe at the hanging-judge assessments we make on the likes of Wayne Barnes, Bryce Lawrence and Craig Joubert.
Plenty of important football World Cup matches have ended farcically and unsatisfactorily, such as the 1990 Argentina-Germany final, and plenty of cricket tests have been marred by poor and inconsistent umpiring (though far less often now).
The big difference is the average viewer has some comprehension of the rules in place, even if they don't agree with the referee or umpire's enforcement of them.
Scrum, maul and breakdown technicalities mean rugby doesn't have that luxury.
I tried to imagine what the first half of the Springbok-Wales quarter-final would have appeared like to a rugby neophyte and the simple truth is that it would have been baffling and off-putting.
The first half of the All Black-South Africa semifinal probably wasn't much better. Try explaining to a Guatemalan watching rugby for the first time why the team who appears to be dominating and playing all the rugby are penalised nine times in 40 minutes for a range of offences of which maybe one was actual foul play.
It's never going to be simple. The premise of rugby and what makes it so attractive on one level is it is designed as a contest for possession at every phase - except, bizarrely, on rolling mauls when it is ... oh, forget it - but somehow that contest has to be uniformly enforced. Good luck.
As for the TMO, the system has largely been successful, although the games are taking longer to complete.
Should the powers of that official be extended? I believe so, and could be used around the 'silent' enforcement of the offside line.
As for crucial decisions, potentially game-deciding decisions, a la Joubert. Tricky, very tricky. Where does it stop?
