The phrase "as initially imagined" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to something that was conceived or envisioned at the beginning of a process or idea.
Example: "The project turned out to be more complex than as initially imagined, requiring additional resources and time."
Alternatives: "as originally envisioned" or "as first conceived".
First, it got women to describe themselves as ugly, then it got an FBI-trained sketch artist to show these women that they weren't as ugly as they initially imagined.
She had initially imagined something as splashy as her Florentine boutique, but Manhattan is a long way from Prato, and she is a careful entrepreneur.
The whole transaction will take longer than initially imagined — potentially as long as a few months to be settled in full — leaving numbers of confused customers stranded on the curb.
Initially imagined as a food gleaning project, wanting to mobilise volunteers to gather perfectly edible but uneconomic produce from local fields, their current focus sees the distribution of grade-out as "a catalyst for creating more cohesive communities and building community confidence and resilience".
She found work at the short-story magazine Argosy; her daughter has written that the pain of those years, when Aiken's job and family left her with no time to work on her novel, deepened her writing, so "The Wolves of Willoughby Chase," which she had initially imagined as a comical nineteenth-century pastiche, became something more.
Excavations in 2012 revealed there was more to Huqoq than initially imagined as the first mosaics were discovered: an inscription with female faces and a small portion of a scene of Samson with the foxes.
Many years in development, "Last Vegas" was initially imagined as a vehicle for Jack Nicholson.
Lang initially imagined their collaboration as a "folk-punk girl group thing"; it has travelled far further than that.
He had long been antagonistic to the French colonial enterprise, and he initially imagined the event in Mexico as something closer to an infernal hallucination than to reportage, a kind of moral nightmare.
The emerging image of the killer that many of the experts see (but not all; anthrax experts agree about as much as economists do) is precisely the opposite of the perpetrator whom we initially imagined.
