we can agree that calling attention to the difference between a linguist and a polyglot who made an auxlang is pedantic

No. We can’t. The difference between a linguist and a polyglot are the core reason why Esperanto is such a disaster as an “international language”. Zamenhof (like most polyglots without at least some education in linguistics, even if that education is mostly auto-didactic) had no clue how language is structured. He had no idea what a phonetic inventory is and what other languages outside of his narrow sphere had. He had no idea what allophony is and “resolved” the allophony issues by avoiding talking about it at all, really. He had no idea what grammatical structures were in use in the world to find something suited to as many of those as possible.

He didn’t know language. He knew a handful of (related) languages. There’s a huge difference here.

I think its fair to say that esperanto has un-gendered nouns since you cannot delineate a gender from just looking at the noun itsself.

Are you smoking something? <patro> vs. <patrino>. One is masculine, the other is feminine. How do you tell? You look at the noun itself. THIS IS GENDERED NOUNS! Now how about <ĉevalo> vs. <ĉevalino>? Indeed the Fundamento has <studento> and <studentino> because things are masculine by default. A female student is a different word from a male student, both being gendered nouns.

So, no, it’s not “fair to say” that the nouns are un-gendered since you can trivially delineate a gender from looking at a noun.

but esperanto does have fewer moods than spanish, so id call it easier than spanish on that front. it also has fewer declensions than russian (to my knowledge)

And it has literally infinitely more declensions than Mandarin (and a lot more languages in the Sino-Tibetan sphere).

esperanto is notably easier to learn than french on account of the ungendered nouns, fewer moods, etc.

To someone already familiar with specifically Continental European languages (at least two), sure. But to a speaker of Mandarin, or Tibetan, or Korean, or Japanese, or … well, a metric ton of languages (I haven’t even touched three more continents!) there’s no meaningful difference in complexity. But there’s a HUGE difference in utility.

i say the french did it beause Gabriel Hanotaux was the one league of nations representative who didnt want to adopt it for international relations

One person vetoed it for one use case once a long time ago (1922).

What’s the excuse for the remaining century and a bit? (Hint: It rhymes with “not good enough to be worth learning given its complete lack of users” because identical rhyme is still rhyme.)

Wow. How many incorrect statements can you pack into a paragraph about Esperanto.

1. Zamenhof wasn’t a linguist. He was an ophthalmologist and an occultist who was also a polyglot. Polyglot is not the same as linguist.
2. Refresh my memory. What does <‑in> signify on nouns again? What are <li>, <ŝi>, and <ĝi>? Surely they aren’t, you know, gender, right?
3. Why are there inflectional tenses, moods, etc. at all. Declining for anything is not necessary. The world’s most-spoken native language has no declensions of any kind really…or one, I guess, if you squint right. (It also didn’t have gendered third-person pronouns until the 1910s, and is now reverting that ever so slowly.) Esperanto declines by gender, by tense, by aspect (and here it’s almost pseudorandom how aspects are signalled and assigned!), by mood, etc.
4. It wasn’t the French who killed Esperanto. It was pretty much everybody in the world who saw no point in using a language that was almost as difficult to learn as French, but hey! at least you couldn’t talk to anybody in it for any reasonable value of “anybody”.
5. Esperanto is “easy to learn” iff you have command of at least two Continental languages, ideally a Slavic one and a Latin one. It is not easy to learn for people who come from languages without declensions. Without word forms. With particulate grammars, or with agglutinative grammars, instead of inflecting grammars. It has a phonetic inventory that is filled with little landmines like the ⟨ĥ⟩ (velar fricative), the ⟨ĵ⟩ (voiced post-alveolar fricative), and the ⟨r⟩ (trill) … and this is before we even start talking about assimilation rules. And the plethora of stringed consonants. Why not just be honest and say “this language is for (some) European speakers only” and be done with it?

Esperanto is only marginally easier (at best!) to learn than to learn actually useful world languages like English, French, Arabic, Mandarin, etc. but hey, at least you can speak to up to 1K/30K-2M L1/L2 speakers (estimates vary … dramatically!) instead of 390M/1.1B (English), 74M/238M (French), 315M/90M (Arabic), and 990M/194M (Mandarin).

So you’re literally saying you’re far from obeying the rules?

After Chengdu, a work getting a Hugo is actually a mark against it. (A small mark against it, but against it nonetheless.)

What’s this year’s scandal going to be?

It’s the difference between eating sugar and eating fruit.

Without the name of the series, I can only provide some very basic thoughts.

The first of these will likely upset you, however. There is, barring actively harming someone, no such thing as BadWrongFun™. Saying that you didn’t like it because you expect more depth is fine. (I’d even agree.) But there was a very strong streak of disdain for those who do not share your tastes in your post. This, IMO, is not fine.

The second of these is that I actually thank authors who make huge series. It tells me that they aren’t serious people and that I won’t enjoy their works. A novel is a very long format for writing. If you can’t get a good, complete, story that actually ends in a single novel, you’re probably not an author I want to read anyway, so thanks for the warning.

I am always dubious of people who claim they have nothing against “the people of <country>” just the government. See it doesn’t fit with lived experience.

I get called upon to answer for every crime (real or imagined) of the Chinese government because I’m perceived as Chinese for these reasons:

• I’m half-Chinese and my appearance leans very much toward my mother’s side.
• I’m resident in China.
• I don’t instantly leap up and criticize everything Chinese, nor do I instantly agree with ever criticism of China.

So I’m basically accused of being a Communist Party of China shill (despite, ironically, my not even being permitted to join the Party if I wanted to … which I don’t), being a “brainwashed” Chinese citizen, despite holding a Canadian passport—and never another—for about half a century, and in general treated with contempt and suspicion.

Despite, you know, “nothing against any Chinese”.

So … perhaps you’re the exception to the observed rule? But I won’t be putting myself on the line to test it. I’ve got well over half a century of testing completed.

edited to add

I have the perfect parallel, actually. Fundamentalist Christians who babble about “love the sinner, hate the sin”. Their actions constantly belie their pretty words. Same for “love the <insert national citizen>, hate the <nation> government” crowd.