From my point of view, it was a huge improvement to not have the Fleegles talking as much as in the previous books. I was getting really bored with their being stupid at each other. They're still strong, still chaotic and enthusiastic, and really good as a foil to Tiffany's seriousness.

I wasn't tracking the angle that's bothering you, but the witches did seem bizarrely helpless for a good bit of the book against a rising tide of anti-witch prejudice.

One thing both books had in common was that there was serious prejudice against characters who were committed to harmlessness and extraordinarily useful. It's a way of saying that prejudice is bad, but I think there's a falseness to it.

Most people are somewhat useful and relatively harmless [1], but I wonder what would happen if people said, "Everyone's a public hazard-- me, you, any people you've got prejudices against. We need to figure out how to live decently (find as many positive sum transactions as possible) together anyway."

[1] I believe that if the majority of people weren't doing more good than harm, the human race would have been taken down by entropy.