Andrew Wheeler has some thoughts on Tempest and the Things Get Worse-ness of the Expanded Universe, to which I can only say… Yeah. I know far too many people, avid EU readers before the NJO, who now are… not. Wheeler hits on the head one reason some folks (including me) view the Bantam line as more successful, depite the mixed quality of the books themselves – storylines very rarely lasted longer than a trilogy or so. You didn’t have book after book of endless catastrophe. If one book or trilogy bored, the next could be a complete 180 in any number of ways. There was, quite simply, variety.
I have hopes for the Legacy series – I’m generally hopeful, at least in the early stages. At the very least, it doesn’t look to be shaping up to anything on the level of the NJO, where I might have welcomed a book by Kevin J. Anderson if he just made the big bad and incredibly boring Yuuzhan Vong simply go away. (Finally, an acceptable use for those excess superweapons!) LOTF, with the linchpin of a civil war where both sides are populated by ‘good’ guys, and the possibility for main baddies who are, if not totally sympathetic, actually interesting, could avoid the NJO syndrome.
Maybe.