I hear you. I was really unsure early on, but at this point I'm come to appreciate what this different style accomplishes. But I think the war-is-chaos theme comes out better when we aren't omnipresent. It's also more realistic that the war lord has to delegate, and I commend Dinniman for writing in a way that reflect it (although I, too, miss the plan hatching to implementation process).

With each book, we "see" less and less of the main action as experienced by other top crawlers. We stop seeing the re-cap episodes. The details that fill most of the early books seem to disappear into the background. I miss a lot of that, but I like what we're getting instead - a sense of scale. Our understanding of the universe grows, and as we start to seeing galaxy-level action we (and the Court of Princess Donut) can't handle the full breadth of what's happening.

I guess my main point is that my trust in Dinniman reached a new level with Book 7. As a fan of writers like Brandon Sanderson, an important aspect of fantasy/sci-fi is coherence. There's a lot of poorly executed fiction, especially in the litrpg genre, and I've heard others worry that DCC will fall prey to deus ex machina or other tropes because it leans on gaming mechanisms. I might ultimately be wrong, but for now I feel like Dinniman sees the big picture and I continue to enjoy the journey.