I've finally made it through the three novels in this series - just the shorts to go - and this is just for my own records, as I read and reviewed the three books separately. 

I just... I can't get past the fact that I find the world-building deeply unconvincing. Both when it came to the factions and when it came to the science. The second bothers me more. The first I can understand as a metaphor, even if I think it's an enormously heavy-handed metaphor, but the second... I know that science fiction often uses handwavium in its world-building, and I'm happy to accept that, so long as the handwavium is internally consistent. Here, it just isn't. The development of genetic science, within the series universe, is so monumentally out-of-step with all the other sciences that it's impossible for me to take the world-building seriously. That kind of scuppers the rest for me, I'm afraid.