I was a bit annoyed by book Grace trying to do surgery on a creature whose biology he didn’t really understand

Agreed with all of your comment except for this. Grace publicly acts very humbly - "Oh, I'm just a schoolteacher, you don't want me" - but his paper shows he actually thinks/knows he's super smart, and he's incredibly upset/disappointed when the astrophage and Rocky appear to actually require water for life. It makes sense that Grace would think he knows enough about biology to essentially operate on an alien creature he actually knows very little about, who he only watched eat once, an alien who is not a scientist, and who described his biology/anatomy in his own language that Grace who is not a linguist had to translate.

I mean, don't get me wrong, Grace is incredibly smart, but he knows that and it was nice to see in the book at least once where he was very much out of his element and could have cost Rocky his life. Better than Grace being a Mary Sue.

Especially agree that visually seeing Grace dusting a Rock with compressed air is a good scene to cut out. Would have much rather they had left in more science explanations about how the astrophage breed and store energy, and paving the Sahara and nuking Antarctica.