Hellmark, it may well be that the earlier "fluff" (as I saw it) was foreshadowing, but that's a pet peeve of mine in series books -- in general, I like my foreshadowing to be largely confined to the current book, with maybe some "next book setup".
(I've even written a blog post about how much I dislike series that start with a Big Ol' Tangled Mess O' Details and the rest of the series is cleaning that mess up little by little. Not that I'm saying the HP series does that, just talking about narrative conservation in general.)
Again, this is all terribly personal and subjective.
But, yeah, even if all the bloated details from the early books came into play later in the later books, it wouldn't make me like the bloated details more.
I love Pullman. Don't much care for L'Engle, though. If she'd gone on even a little bit more about virgins and angel/demon/human slash fic in the Noah's Ark book I would have been sick. Way too fetishized, imho. Harry Potter, for all it's OMG EDITOR STAT! ness at least treated teen sexuality with a degree of sensitivity and didn't sound like a Moral Guardian reminding me every three pages that IF SOMEONE TOUCHES YOUR NAUGHTY BITS, YOU CAN NEVER RIDE A UNICORN AGAIN. Noted, L'Engle. Move on. Seriously.
