Different strokes I guess. I thought REAMDE was rather dull but Seveneves was a nice bounceback.
FWIW my favorite Stephenson novel is still Anathem.
I have read only 2 of his novels so far - and they in my top10 list of books.
Cryptonomicon & SnowCrash - I've read the first book of the Baroque Cycle too!
They can hardly get worse. I used to be a huge fan of NS, but Seveneves was the last book of his I bought without reading review first. He seems to have decided that character development is for other people, not to mention the gaping plot holes. Sloppy and superficial.
Huh, I thought the book was pretty good. (Warning: spoilers ahead.) I couldn't put it down for the first 500 pages. Things got a little slow in the second part of the book, but I thought the character development in terms of the races of Eves was a really interesting twist. You still "knew" the characters based on their ancestors. I do wish he had fleshed out the history of the Diggers and Pingers, but that could be an entire book in itself.