I can see why you and others weren't impressed with his performances against Celta and Anderlecht but I thought he did fine. Just personal preference, I guess.
I'll never argue that he loses the ball too easily because he does, and it was one of the main reasons I wasn't keen on signing him. I agree, we need our best players to step up in these matches but our tactics, IMO, prevent them from doing so. Whether it was Rashford, Martial or Mkhi up front against City they were completely isolated and ended up conceding possession due to our whole team being camped. Heck, we employed the same tactics away to Liverpool and Zlatan struggled, too.
You have a point about the way we seem to camp in our zone. Jose needs to unshackle the team a bit more, no doubt. But I think a big part of the problem is the quality of our midfield and defence. We are really short of ballers. I mean players who are very comfortable on the ball, can retain it long enough and set the team attacking. Pogba is the only real baller we have in the midfield. Herrera does well breaking up play and passing at short distances especially. Carrick's passing is good and he's calm. But both are not real ballers. We all know about Fellaini. Mikhi who could be a real baller seems to have lost his magic. Fortunately, Mata is back but he has never really impressed me enough to classify him as an X-factor type of player.
In defence, the closest to being ballers are Bailly and Rojo. The rest are not. Valencia is good though, in terms of his attacking runs.
Until we have a sizeable number of players who can keep the ball well, beat the player in from of them and set the team in attack mode, then we will continue to be the team that soaks up attacks and merely hopes for lucky breaks.
Jose's Inter, Madrid and title winning Chelsea teams had enough ballers to hit opponents well on the break. They would soak up attacks but hit back with devastating effect.
The second problem this current United team has that makes it look like a team that merely attempts to soak attacks is poor finishing. Take yesterday for instance, our analysis would be very different if we had converted the Rooney and Martial chances. The analysis of the City game would have been different if Herrera had scored. Etc.
I suspect that if United buys well in the Summer, we'll be less critical of Jose's tactics.