Another vote for the Vorkosigan saga!
I happen to really like Weber's work personally... if you're stuck on Basilisk Station, my advice would be to skip the middle third or so. The Honor Harrington series gets significantly better after the first one. Also, the Starfire series is excellent and involves significantly more action.
I also found that I really liked Eric Flint's work, including 1632 and the Belisarius series, which is a collaboration between Flint and David Drake. Great alternate history stuff there, with some cool sci-fi overtones.
Also, if you don't mind slightly softer sci-fi, Elizabeth Moon's Heris Serrano series is also quite good. The first book is a bit slow (including a rather drawn-out sequence involving a foxhunt...) but after that they're really quite engaging with some great political themes and examinations of the social results of technology... much like the Vorkosigan books, in fact.
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