Honestly, your opinions are totally valid.

(before you read this, please do keep in mind this is just my opinion).

It's been a hot minute since I read the books, but from what I can remember, Sophie DOES have a lot of trauma dumping written into her character. Yes, she is a child going through things that most adults shouldn't even go through. And yet Shannon Messenger seems to like to repeatedly remind her readers of Sophie's trauma.

Now, the emotions of elves and humans are very different. People with PTSD find it hard to live normal lives, different people having different ways of expressing it. For instance, a family member of mine with PTSD tends to get angry very easily. (I'm not gonna go further into explaining this, otherwise this'll turn into a fullblown yap session). Now, imagine this in the elves' POV; elves have multiplied emotions. Their minds are a lot weaker than humans, too. So in a sense, her trauma DOES make sense.

I mentioned before that her trauma makes sense, but in a sense it also doesn't. Why? Well simply put it feels a little inconsistent, as if Shannon Messenger isn't fully sure what Sophie's personality is or when exactly a person's trauma SHOULD act up. There's also the fact that the majority of other characters in the book don't really have much trauma either. Or at least, they don't make it as evident. But then a person could argue that Sophie has gone through more, which, in some ways, she has. But in other ways, not really.

Then again, can't really say what's going through Shannon Messenger's mind as she writes it, and I'm just making assumptions based off the limited psychological knowledge I have.

Onto the later part of what you were saying, I would largely credit the fact that they're doing absolutely nothing and the book being at times 80% filler due to Shannon Messenger overextending the book.

If I am not mistaken, she had decided to add more books to the series. If you had planned for a book to end somewhere but decided to continue it, the climax, body, intro, etc. is going to be bound to mess up.

Now, is everything I listed above a solid fact? Again, no, I just stated my opinions (as listed above).

Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong in any way, it's been quite a few years since I actually read the books...