Mind you, genre fiction is genre fiction. You go to a Wendys, you order a burger, you're not expecting Heston Blumenthal.
Ilsa Bick is probably a good writer. I happen to think she is a poor genre fiction writer, and that the two things are interrelated.
CS, you know I admire your writing greatly. But I suspect you would be a poor contributor to a genre pool. Imagine if all the factions & states got clever. It'd make the storyline enormously harder to manage for the game line. Yes, some of us would lap it up until all the logical contradictions inherent in the base imploded.
The best we can hope for is that the writers give us a good ride along the way, have some twists and some humourous interludes, and don't forget major plot elements along the way (black boxes, anyone?) The enormous pause in novel production kinda damages that.
If we Falcons are going out, let us do so in the biggest, most casualty-ridden blaze of angst possible! "Better to burn out, than to fade away!" quoth Star Captain Kurgan ;)