It is not a common fantasy to be constrained working within an evil bureaucracy you don’t like and can’t take down without the help of another equally large entity, perhaps a competing empire, doing the heavy lifting, if ever. It does offer verisimilitude but that hardly satisfies our longings – it reminds us of the real world and it’s real constraints. The more you long for reality the more you may long to in fact leave the genre entirely. However constraint in a dramatic sense can be useful. Without rules even fantasy can seem unlikely.

In this sense perhaps SF itself doesn’t pass the BS test. Is there a middle ground? Sure, but it takes eccentric artistry to help walk it, not simply logic and reason. There will be fans on both ends of the spectrum and in between. As you say, in the end, do as you want to and keep in mind the rent at the same time. To a certain extent SF’s own popularity has worked to constrain it as popularity equals money equals delivering progressively more narrow novels that are increasingly mainstream to satisfy mainstream tastes. Bright eccentricity, tolerated within a semi-popular genre has problems when it encounters market forces. There is art and there is commodity and sometimes they don’t get along very well.

I disagree about the pulse-pounding adventure: Jack Vance could make buying a sandwich interesting and “Infinity Beach” by Jack McDevitt has very little action and is compelling and suspenseful. Same with “Beyond the Blue Event Horizon” and any number of novels I could mention.