developmental editing improves books (the fall of book editing: the sequel)

The one thing that I noticed with this particular story is there's a lot of bloat of characters. It's like very character soupy. There's a lot of characters and very like minor characters. And so there's a whole friend group element in this book that really changes nothing.

The example that I have from a book that I read this year is Masquerade by O Sangui. There was a certain pacing to that character development in that book... at the end there were some character things that seemed to happen really quickly.

This was a book that I was like, this editing wise could have been improved so much cuz I think the bones were so good for this. But this is a cozy fantasy that has very low stakes at the beginning and then the ending is like incredibly high stakes, dangerous, whatever.

I just didn't particularly love it because it wasn't for me because it's an office romance and like I don't really like office romances... but like editing wise were there any things that I like noted were super editing flaws in that book? No.