I've always been intrigued by the artstyles of the witches, love me some fun monster design.
But wondering what the show is like. As I get older I find myself having less patience for certain types of anime bullshit (libertarianism, loli, that kind of cringe)
So, is Madoka worth watching or is it 
It's just a well done subversion of the popular tropes in its genre when it was made, which earned it a lot of points back when that was novel and you went into it just thinking you were going to watch a magical girl anime. When you know that that's not what it is it loses a lot of the magic, as it were. It's fine, but it didn't really blow me away.
It's not made for pedophiles though. Shouldn't be any risk of running into that sort of stuff.
Do I need to watch 500 magical girl animes first for context? I've only watched the first two seasons of Sailor Moon.
That's more than enough context
It was the first magical girl anime I ever saw, I'd say it stands on its own well enough. People like us just don't get the full context