Great narration but floundering story

The first three novels in this series were wonderful; they spent the needed time introducing the primary characters and concepts along with the enemies and developing them. It concluded with victory, of course, and a level of closure for the series.
I had assumed that would be the end of this series.

Then bam! Surprise, new release by KL for the first colony series!

I was excited to check it out, and I was actually predicting/hoping that it would be set a hundred or more years later with a brand new cast of characters and would be addressing the NEEIS plot device that was left wide open from the first three instalments.
I was right on one part and very wrong on the other.

The manner in which all of the pre-existing characters were presented in this ripped apart the closure of the third book and seemed to say. "To hell with it!" To what their development had been.

Connor's personal and official reasons for leaving the CDF made complete and total sense, but given his role in how the events of the trilogy played out, with literally being the saviour of the colony (the last of humanity), I couldn't understand why a level of openness couldn't have been relayed to the colony at large as to why he was officially being sidelined. Or at the very least, how on earth (or on New Earth?) could the soldiers of the CDF be so pathetically thin-skinned to feel "abandoned" after the literally single hero of Humanity saved their species and then said that he was ready to retire?

You would think that his actions and successes would have earnt him widespread respect from everyone in the colony. That anyone would be happy to say, "Yeah, Connor Gates has served beyond anything that we could have asked for and saved our species. He deserves the most relaxed retirement possible with utmost respect."

I might be stretching a little there, but the whole abandonment reason for the phycho squad to hate him was seriously vexatious to follow with how weak it was.

Then we get to Lenora, the dumbest smart person you've never wanted to experience in this book.
For a character that was well set up from the first three, and an experienced academic who from her life on Earth had risen through the relevant educational and scientific hierarchy to manage to get to where she did, you would think that she would have a healthy respect for due process and safety, let along being smart enough to understand why those things are important.
But nope, apparently, she wasn't.
Despite Conner having saved their entire species and shown incredible patience for her throughout the series, she doesn't seem to have any real respect for him at all, nor the simple practices regarding security for the scientific teams that he tries to impose for the safety of said scientists -and as a side effect all other colonists.
In this novel, she is simply an enabler who is too big for their boots.

Which leads on to Dash.
So the begin with, he breaks all of the rules, puts the lives of those who he's convinced to come with him at risk, and the lives of those whose duty it is to protect them at risk.
This is all because he's something of a savant of NEIIS tech... But all we ever hear regarding his interaction with the tech is that he's relying on his pda's/AI's translation of the NEIIS language to do a very basic navigation of the working technology.
His apparent importance (and thus that of his friends) felt forced and unwelcome), and the fact that he didn't have any real repercussions at all for his actions were at best, uncivilized.
The manner in which he and his friends found their way around their "punishment" was all too pathetically predictable, so off they went to make the same F*** up on a larger scale.
The whole time I was silently hoping Dash and Lenora would be victims of the Ryklars.

Nearing the end where it was Conner vs Rogue CDF squad(Never explained why they thought potentially eliminating the last of Humanity would give them the support they wanted), and it started to feel like it was finally getting into the right pace.

Which was; Conner simply outclassed them. Which in my mind, felt right. He was a special forces soldier who spent his entire life doing black ops and then designed the training program for the CDF.
But that boiled down to his eventual hand to hand fight with... The generic phycho in charge. His name didn't stick... What should have been a relatively easy fight for Conner was for no apparent reason a hard fight.
Which he only survived thanks to the resident dumb smart person.
That would have been the moment to bring closure back into the picture and have Conner totally outclass this around the corner bozo and break him down nice and simple.

This novel finished with me feeling like it was an absolute discredit to the original three.
It took the well-developed characters and made them weak, stupid, short-sighted, arrogant and pathetic.
It introduced new main characters who aided the above discrediting of the originals, and also went a way to proving that this colony is doomed to endless issues if the population is anything like them.
It added a new kind-of villain in the form of a thin-skinned soldier whose reasoning is as lacking as could be.

If this series continues, as it seems it might, I seriously hope it reclaims what made the first three original and good.

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