I had no idea I'm in the minority of people not liking this episode. There was almost nothing House about it. I spent lots of time the two weeks before the premiere to re-watch season 5 and was waiting for the new season of House to start, and to me, it ended up being a 2 hour waste because the characters introduced will likely not return, and he most likely won't become nice, so this could have been done like past seasons where time elapsed and he comes back from time off, and was off vicodin.
Only way the premiere would actually be of any value to the story is if he became nice to people (which won't happen), or if they replace Kutner with a psychologist, which doesn't make much sense either. Would I have liked it if it was a one hour side story instead of the premiere? Probably. But to me, it felt like 2 hours of non-canon.