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so... a baked ball of controlled fungus with bee vomit and a cow's fat-based mucus

I'm not. At least not any more so than usual. I was born senile.

English is not very modulated. You can speak it in a flat tone and be perfectly understood, unlike Chinese where pitch and pace changes are required (effective modulation).

Useless party fact: English become tonal when counting. Try reciting someone a phone number or count to ten without changing tones.

Supreme Bashar (an introduced rank of the Chapter House Bene Gesserit)... arguably the man in charge of the most powerful force of fighting men in the 3000+ years covered by the first 5 books. If you can name how his uniform colour differed from the sardukkar, I'll agree you should have more than 3 colour patterns (good guy, bad guy, neutral). Bonus points if you can do it without google - I'll even stop moaning about the AI

If we must ram it into the 7 plots, I would suggest Tragedy because of the way Powell's plan --er -- blows up

But their opponents aren't playing by the same rules. I mean instead of fighting man-to-man, the opponent uses his ship as a battering ram. What's the value in fighting fair when the other side fights dirty?

Apparently I reviewed v5 and cherry picked Amy's review of v4

The AIs of VQ are super smart -- I've given them no limitations in that department. However this is merely booksmarts - I didn't give them dominance in every intelligence. For example:
-AIs will beat humans in math accuracy, computations per second, marksmanship, exposure to vacuum, etc
-humans will beat AIs at complex physical tasks (such as swimming the breast stroke. If you let the AI churn water in any fashion like a motor boat, it will win - but not if it has to make a humanlike motion), musical performance (AIs will win if they're allowed to synthesize the music, or if the music is a fixed piece such as Beethoven. When it comes to improv or making new music, humans win), and rapidly dealing with new environmental conditions (such as a volcanic eruption)

I was able to limit my AIs by power - something you might not have the luxury of doing in the 41st century. Basically, the smallest fusion core won't fit in an AI's chest, so they are battery-driven. They're also weak to EMP blasts, and I had their mental cortex made of a rare substance which means they can't replicate to infinity. Basically, I've trapped them into cities and dependent on the same electrical grid as people.

I went with laws against armed AIs because they turned into an army of indiscerning killers X-hundred years ago.

I decided to set my unemployment rate for humans at 90% which means that humans are regularly performing tasks a machine can do better just to scrape out a living. This keeps humans poor and relatively angry at machines, and therefore supportive of administrations that want to keep the machines unarmed.

I've got about 10 chapters of Laurie's tale set aside to explore this dynamic. That's a quarter of her book dedicated just to the machine-human relationship (during which she's pretending to be a pleasure-droid to uncover clues and gets exposed to human's nasty side). I mention this fact so you can see how quickly complex AI-human relations can dominate a story.

If he's that good a cadet, it doesn't matter... he'll be allowed into the funeral. Luke Skywalker snuck into all sorts of high profile situations and no one ever stopped him to ask if he had an invite.

not mentioned is the narration style.

In 3rd omniscient, go ahead... fire away!

But in 3rd limited, it's a little intrusive. Other than resorting to that moment the character looks in a mirror, directly narrating their looks is a step away from the narrator's "home" position. Should be used sparingly.

Compare to a first person limited: "I walked through the front door and my partner looked into my beautiful brown eyes and said, 'hi'". This is weird in a limited POV. THe temptation in 3rd limited is to go ahead and do this because it's easy - no pronoun change. Yet, it's just as much of a shift in gears to omniscient.

I mention all this because ITMG tends to lean to limited. It might be pertinent to your question

Why oh why??

I whole hearetedly agree.
At least one character should find 1000 ways to die (Marsha)
Some characters should cheat death and get the reader's hopes up only to die anyway. Preferably at some inconvenient time for the remainder of the cast
Some characters (Inga) need to find a fate worse than death
Some characters (K-j-) need to be so amazing even Amy and Black John can worship him