It took a while, but I came to really appreciate Chrome Flesh. It managed two things quite well I thought:
- it introduced a ton of new crunch which added options without overshadowing existing 'ware or drug (other than maybe custom drugs, when you dug into them they were pretty good). And yes some of that ware was of more interest to NPC than to PC, but that helps the setting too.
- it managed to do a reset on nanoware, and to some extent nanotech in general, to keep it from being god tech but not having CFD completely eliminate it.
I liked both Cutting Aces and Hard Targets for their combination of setting, fluff, and crunch. Each had some interesting crunch, gave the basics for a setting that really hadn't been touched before, and gave some ideas for different character types and even campaign types. There was some stuff that seemed a bit like filler, and I thought both could have used more GM advice for how to make these things (assassinations, cons) interesting. Cutting Aces falls a bit behind Hard Targets for me, because
I thought it spent way too much time describing classic cons for getting money, without discussing how to adapt them to things that 'runners are more apt to care about (access, leverage, information, etc). But still I thought both books were overall quite good and I would keep buying books that took this sort of combined approach.
And honorable mentions to Rigger 5 for delivering some very fun stuff and not being the final book to come out for 5th edition, and to pdf only publications like Aetherology and the Shadows in Focus books, which were a nice way to cover some more niche items at an appropriate length for the material. I hope these sold well enough that we'll more things like this in the future.