David Palmer wrote a novella, called Emergence, which was serialized in Analog magazine. He also wrote Seeking, which was a followup novella, also serialized in Analog, IIRC. These two novellas were published as a novel, and I greatly enjoyed them.
Not too long ago, he wrote a sequel to that novel, which was also serialized in Analog. Dear og, Analog’s editor should have taken a dozen very sharp blue pencils and gone to town. Palmer described, in excruciating detail, just how this particular aircraft control was tweaked one way or the other. These little notes didn’t add anything to the story, other than pad out the word count. In fact, I would argue that since the story is set in the future, that such details are likely to be completely wrong, and detract from the story. Perhaps some airplane geeks enjoyed the details, but unless the reader is completely fascinated with just How An Airplane Works, eyes are gonna glaze over and skip most of the story. Or at least, MY eyes glazed over and I skipped most of the story. Putting in all that detail didn’t increase the drama at all, and in fact greatly decreased my enjoyment of the story. There were great big blocks of airplane details, more than there were blocks of story action.
I think that this may have been the straw that broke the camel’s back for my Analog subscription. I still read and enjoy a lot of science fiction. However, most of the stories in Analog are just not really that great for me, and lately I just haven’t been able to read at least half of the fiction that’s in every issue of the magazine. The science articles are mostly about things that I don’t care about, and sometimes are written way over my head…and I usually enjoy reading science articles, if I have the background to understand them. So, I’ve let my subscription lapse, with some grief. My maternal grandfather was a subscriber, and he got me started reading selected stories when I was 8, and then let me have unrestricted access to the whole magazines when I was 10 or 11. He kept all the old issues, and one of the joys of going to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s was getting to read back issues, and selected books. I’m very sentimental about Analog, and it was the first magazine I subscribed to when I had my own earned money. As the years went by, it was the magazine that I kept a subscription to, unless we were absolutely broke, and the first luxury item that I’d buy when we had money again. However, over the past years, I’ve noticed a decline in the quality of the stories, and I’ve given up on the magazine.