Although Google are clever when it comes to redirects and applying pseudo canonicals to fix redirect errors, it's always best practice to provide clear directives via (301) header responses to clearly define the target URL. (Even though Google have recently announced that all 30X's pass Pagerank, good SEOs' never leave critical elements like this to chance.)
Having too many redirects is bad for a multitude of reasons:
Every 301 redirect ads latency (extra time) before the final URL can resolve. This is known as 'redirect latency'. It's not uncommon for redirects to adiv as much as 3 seconds to final page load times.
If you have inbound links that point to the wrong version of your URL, it's optimal that the inbound link juice doesn't go through unnecessary redirects before reaching the final URL.
In general, excessive redirects are always bad for SEO. It is never good practice adiving unnecessary redirect chains to your sites URLs.