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At this point, I need to rework my volume and a half of The Sorcerer's Progress, but you're welcome to earn points and I will read what you wrote, and maybe reply.

Some of them are rich hacks.  Which matters more: the praise of your professional peers or of your present and future audience?  I'm not saying you can't have both, but some of those hacks have created stories that fill C.S.Lewis's definition of myth: a story that can suffer changes in plot, character, place, and era, and still remain recognizable as the same story.

Put The Phantom of the Opera in ancient Greece, replace opera with the plays and choruses, and it would be the same central story.  Replace the congenital deformation with acid scarring, and you have the same central story.

Convince me that Gaston Leroux was not a hack writer.  He was a newspaperman, and his stories were sold as serials.  And he gave us not only Phantom but The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a classic of mystery/detective fiction.

Know the rules, yes.  But know when they can be broken to gain something else.  Be not afraid to boldly split the infinitive, if it will take you where no story has gone before.

If Gaston Leroux doesn't convince you, what about Damon Runyon?

As though listening to locate a sound ...

Y'all do realize you're being a lot harder than all but the most wantonly particular readers.

I have no problem with example one UNLESS you are trying to limit yourself to the character's actions and sense impressions, denying narrator and reader access to the character's state of mind.  That sort of limitation seems to be in fashion now, but I think it's like much of "modern classical" "music"; it's more appealing to composers, musicians and critics (writers, editors, and critics) than to listeners (readers).

Feel free to enjoy Karlheinz Stockhausen and Philip Glass.  I'll take Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, and even Ives, Ives who told a restive audience to "sit down and take your dissonance like men."

So here I am, never fully gone, as the few who have received reviews can attest.

I have, somewhere, a couple of chapters I might add to Book Two, but my main thinking, these last couple of months, has been large-scale structure, Books One, Two, and Beyond.  I've spent the last few days wrangling with the over-extended Erevain sequnce, and I think I have a solution, though I want to work out some other Book One things before I start writing and posting.

What do my readers (if any I have left) prefer?

Craig Shaw Gardener wrote send-ups of heroic fantasy.    In the last volume of one series (A disagreement with Death, I think) he has the protagonist stride off into the sunset, trailed by all the characters sucked into his adventures.  Of course, for a truly epic cast, you can look to the Girl Genius story, now in its nineteenth year.  (http://girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php, dramatis personae available here: https://girlgenius.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Characters, about 300 characters listed, from Abbess to Zuli)

A sentence can stretch from clause to clause like a long linked chain, and yet remain readable if it pursues a single topic thread throughout.  Such can be found in Philip Bobbitt's =The Shield of Achilles= (nonfiction).  Bobbitt is supremely erudite, and though he takes no pains to show it it cannot be hidden.

Hinkley deserves a better-named disease than that.  Hinkley's Elusive Idiopathy might do.  Professor Hinkley insisted that he suffered from it ... but nobody could see anything wrong with him.  Though they did wonder why he bought stock in a handkerchief manufacturer.

"Idiopathic" means that it's something that's unique as far as anyone knows.  In other words, no diagnosis.

In the Girl Genius story, a character is diagnosed with Vericus Pentiliax's Chromatic Death ... which is not usually fatal.  But it turns out that he has Hogfarb's Resplendent Immolation.  Which is, although he might just melt instead of going off like a Roman Candle.  Hard to tell ... and they don't let it happen.  They kill him instead ... but only temporarily, so they can clear the disease from his system.  But not before everyone who matters comes down with it as well.  Which leads to one of the best fifty or sixty lines in the story: http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20100113

Take that kid who always bullied you in school and name a disease after him.

The ampersand is a functional character in HTML, and must be turned into an escape sequence--which begins with an ampersand.  I see evidence that the story data store here is HTML-based--for instance, the way that tagging text in an inline review cannot cross a paragraph boundary and sometimes extends beyond where you want it to.  The enforced boundaries (which include places where font changes occur --or previously occurred) are consistent with behaviour based on HTML-represented text.  HTML representation means that the certain text characters--especially the ampersand and the angle bracket--must be 'quoted' by turning them into 'escape sequences'.  HTML has a specific name for its way of doing this, but it's a general problem in programming, and computer science has studied it.  What happens when you want to 'quote' an escape sequence?  Whatever interprets the HTML text has to know at each point whether it has escape-processed text or escape-unprocessed text.  And that's a place for errors, and a place where malicious code attacks too often succeed.  (This is not a secret, but a basic dimension of the problem.)

So Dirk isn't drunk, isn't tripping, isn't seeing UFOs.  What he's reporting is a very plausible fault pattern.

Dorothy Sayers was educated as few are today.  She was a hard worker and very talented.  Do not compare yourself to the natives of Mt. Olympus.

"Vitale always admired..."  Try opening with "The basilica had a long and storied history" (or such).  You've moved from Vitale to the church.  Stay there, don't alternate unless you have a purpose.