A lot of us seem to manage.
Tony is probably caught up in his own story. Considering the plots of his stories in EVE center around the same characters/situations...
I think it is probably best that he is not part of CCP right now. I enjoyed the novel, but the devblog announcing his exit kind of summed it up for me.
Bringing EVE to life through storytelling and world building has been one of my greatest joys. For the past six years, I’ve devoted myself to building this IP through the sheer power of her setting—hands down the most underutilized force in EVE. I walked the floors of conventions dreaming of the day when we might have a 30 foot tall poster of Tibus Heth or Empress Jamyl to compete with the larger-than-life icons of other IP’s like the Master Chief and Commander Sheppard..
This is my issue. This may be the underlying cause of the issues others are seeing. It's a disconnected viewpoint of what the writer thinks EVE
should be as opposed to what it is and
could be. Not only that, but it's attempting to put EVE into an entirely different field of play that it shouldn't even be compared to.
EVE is not DUST. DUST will never be Mass Effect or HALO.
/soapbox
Long and the short of it: It's hard to see the forest for the trees when you're pruning a banzai with blinders on.
Also: I loved the novel. It's a guilty pleasure.