The Cowboy Bebop Japanese dub is awful. There are a lot of anime where the original dubs are bad, and there are enough examples of good English dubbing, even if it is mostly bad. Rejecting it out of hand is total snobbery. I don't "respect" the choice of the directors, producers, etc of the original any more than I "respect" the choice of casting directors in American films. Sometimes the wrong person gets cast. I'm not going to respect Gus Van Sant's pick of Vince Vaughn to play Norman Bates in Psycho. As it turns out in Gus Van Sant's list of potentials Vaughn was something like number 17 in line to be offered the part. The wrong guy for the part. Now, if this got ported over to Japan and they could physically rip the actor out of that movie and replace him with a competent Japanese one that could pull of the role, then more power to them. No respect of Van Sant, or Mr. 17th in line Vaughn required. It just so happens that it is easier to replace voice actors than it is to replace actual actors.
Foreign films also aren't the same thing as animation, obviously. For foreign films it is a lot more reasonable to want to hear the original actors voice, and to have the whole thing sync properly. In animation, the Japanese voices rarely sync up properly because you don't animate in accordance with real life. You cut corners in order to be close enough for verisimilitude. You learn how to animate the entire formation of a word, but you never actually put it into practice.
Even so, I can think of foreign films where the dub is still better because there was more effort put into the localization. The subs wind up being translated into English by someone who speaks English as a second language. The dialogue might make more sense to a person whose native language is that of the original dialogue, but when the native English speaking actors start reading over that script they poke holes in it and it gets rewritten so the dialogue actually makes sense.
Literally translated, non-localized subtitles are extremely annoying and are especially common in Asian films. Turns of phrase and metaphors that have no meaning in English; historical quotes become uneloquent catch phrases when the are translated from English into Japanese and then back into English by a person that isn't even aware that it is a quotation in the first place; actual hard science gets turned into technobabble because the translators don't have the literary or scientific background that the writers did. Sometimes fansubs are better than what is on the DVD.
Not always, but sometimes the dubs correct these errors because a single translator putting together subs is a lot more likely to make mistakes with localization than a dozen voice actors, sound engineers, directors, etc are, and they are almost universally native English speakers as well that spot things like 'bite the wax tadpole' being total nonsense and needing to be changed.
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