I'm so glad you feel like this is a true statement, I truly am - no sarcasm. It's awesome to feel like your investment has been respected and validated; I'm glad you got what you were looking for from Coda.
For me, the issue is which characters and which continuity they focused on. Whether it was a result of constraints they were given, their own authorial choices, or both, this was emphatically not a tribute to or culmination of prior LitVerse works. Almost everything in this book, Devidians included, built from canon storylines and focused on canon characters. Perhaps these authors all got into writing TrekLit in the first place because they loved the TV shows and the TV show characters, and so given a chance they went back to that wellspring and said a fond farewell to the things they loved in the first place. But, Mirror Universe and Sam Bowers aside, they evidently didn't make any attempt to do so for the TrekLit characters and storylines I've loved so much.
They clearly made the call that focusing on, eg, fond farewells between Geordi and Data would have much more resonance / import than, oh I don't know, giving Torvig a chance to shine. And to be fair to them, it seems like they made the right choice for a lot of readers - most people in here seem basically happy with the emphasis on TV show characters and storylines, to the exclusion of almost anything that made TrekLit itself unique or exciting. It's not super surprising that most readers of TrekLit were fans first of the TV shows that TrekLit was written to tie into, I guess.
But, as someone else said earlier in the thread, TrekLit WAS my Trek. TNG is the only Trek show I've watched in its entirety; I was a fairly casual fan before I read Avatar and got totally sucked in to the books. It just sucks to get to the end and have the whole sense of the books as a storytelling achievement all their own be undercut for a return to focus on pure tie-in writing by some of the very authors that created a separate thing worthy of standing on its own in the first place.
If TrekLit really was as good as onscreen Trek (and for my money, it was often better - my list of personal TrekLit highlights towards the end of my review is all more meaningful to me than anything onscreen) then it was worth appreciating on its own merits, not just as a chance to give the TV show leads chances for tearful goodbyes, culminating in a long elegy for the one character who still literally has a canon TV show named after him.
I'll read about Geordi and Data and Picard again. I'll never get another chance to read a new story about Torvig, or Liam O'Donnell, or Prynn Tenmei, or Lonnoc Kediar, or Mackenzie Calhoun (in all likelihood), or this version of the Breen, or the Tzenkethi, or any of those other things on that long list of missed opportunities I wrote.
It's clear to me that these authors loved Data. I wish they loved the characters they came up with just as much, because I do.
I'll grant you that it felt as if some of the Litverse-specific characters didn't receive as much attention as the non-Litverse-specific characters did, but I see that as more a result of the fact that the Litverse characters are and for the most part always have been supplemental to the ongoing storylines of the characters we followed from the television and films.
Not exclusively, mind you, but certainly Litverse-specific characters were introduced into storylines that centered around the "core cast".
We saw this a LOT in the TNG Litverse storylines, where new senior officers on the Enterprise seemed to change out with astonishing frequency, while the core cast stayed largely the same.
I think, considering that there was a LOT to pack into these three books, the authors did a good job at trying to hold some kind of balance between Litverse-specific elements and core cast.
Take, for example, the fact that in book two, the Enterprise was abandoned at Spacedock so that the Aventine could escape. The Aventine (a purely Litverse creation, as well as one of my favorite ships) ended up being the "hero ship" for a great deal of that book.
In book three, the hero ships were almost exclusively Litverse creations (Titan and the MU jaunt ships).
Some of the Litverse character deaths in book three felt almost glanced over, but David Mack did make the point to include them. My heart hurt for Torvig's death, and I wanted to cry with Xin over Melora's death.
If anything, I felt more remorseful that characters like Tuvok, Tom, and B'Elanna seemed almost neglected (and these were arguably older and more core cast).
As heartbreaking as it would have been, I would have liked to have known that Tom, B'Elanna, and Miral were together when the end came, or that Tuvok was able to share a distinctly un-Vulcan moment of grief with his wife.
The Mirror Universe that occupied a good third of book three was almost entirely the Mirror Universe crafted by the Litverse in the past decade.
All that said, everyone of us coming to these last three books are almost certainly going to respond differently to the ending of a Star Trek continuity that (at least for me) is older than than the TV or movie continuity that it splintered from.
I won't say that it ended it for me satisfactorily, but I also acknowledge that ending the Litverse satisfactorily for me was NEVER really a possibility.
The authors had a damn-near insurmountable hill to climb with this trilogy, and they were never going to please everyone with it, but they brought their talents to it in a way that I genuinely respect.
It ended. It was awful, but I knew that if these characters I love had to go to their end, I'd follow with them.
