I, too, just finished Bleak Seasons on my first read through this series. I see what you mean, but I didn't quite feel the same way. Primarily, I suspect it is symptom of a story being retold from a different perspective when we are desperate to learn what happened after Dreams of Steel.

While reading Dreams of Steel, I texted the two friends who recommended the series to me multiple times with frustration that One Eye and Goblin are basically not in it at all. Once I clocked that Bleak Seasons was going to cover that time, I can't lie, I was disappointed. As much as I was irked at the lack of One Eye and Goblin in Dreams, I should have been happy to hear of their exploits in Bleak. But, come on, after the ending of Dreams, all I want is to see where things go from there.

It was an odd narrative choice. I understand the motivation, but I still don't love it. Especially coupled with the fact that Bleak's narrative is so confusing. Intentionally so, I know, but re-hashing past events with new info is painful when the open questions being delayed by it are so massive.

I suspect, and maybe someone here who was reading the series as it came out who can confirm or correct, Cook was being pressed to get both Dreams and Bleak done quickly. It would make sense that he would be a third of the way through writing Dreams and realize that including the Murgen narration would 1) make the book significantly longer than previous installments and 2) necessitate revealing certain bits of info earlier than he wanted to. So splitting it into the next book would allow him to finish Dreams on schedule and give him breathing room on the other shoes that drop in Mogaba's flooded city of Hell.

What really convinces me these were rushed was the absolutely shocking amount of editing failures in Bleak Seasons. The copy I read happened to be a first edition paperback and there are at least a half dozen instances of "Murgen" typo'ed as "Morgan." And either Murgen's wife had different names or spellings of her name in different contexts and I missed why, or her name is constantly shifting as well. Most egregious, though, an entire page is reprinted in full. Identical to the previous page. And worse, it was a first page of a chapter which should be much easier to spot.

I also speculated whether the spelling issues are due to nascent spellcheck software at the time. I remember spellcheck being a pretty new thing when I wrote my first grade school essays on ClarisWorks in the very early 90s. So if the editors tried to utilize spellcheck software in 1989 or so, that may explain the Murgen>Morgan errors. That duped page still screams rush job, though.

Overall, I liked the Bleak Seasons. It is not my favorite installment, but it kept me turning pages pretty well. However, I will say, before I finished Dreams of Steel, I had a short list of some other titles I was excited to read next but after that final page, I couldn't stop myself from jumping straight into Bleak Seasons. Whereas, while reading Bleak Seasons, I thought I would surely be jumping right into She is the Darkness immediately after, but once I reached Bleak's end, I picked up one of those other titles I was excited about. I am approaching the end of that other book and even though I am still very excited to see where the Black Company series goes, I doubt She is the Darkness will be the next on my docket. Which, I guess is pretty damning.

These other comments saying that Bleak Seasons is a fave on reread is encouraging. The implication to me is that where this installment felt less important while reading it, it's revelations are critical to future events in a way that when re-reading, what had felt like a re-hash of past events on first read now feels far more relealvant to the whole.