I recently reread Anathem, and while searching for our world's equivalent of Diax's Rake, found in the online acknowledgements that

Almost every page of Anathem bears some imprint from [Julian Barbour']s more recent The End of Time

So that I had read and taken in his ideas (at that deep level mainly reserved for well-written Conjunction Fallacies), and read the Quantum Physics sequence, probably explains why I found nothing new in the book itself.