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 Stevefamine wrote:

Cawl stockpiled and innovated in safety

Cawl's master move was probably to abscond from the ridiculous levels of infighting and internal turmoil in the Imperium - sitting out stuff like the Age of Apostasy & Reign of Blood, the various schisms in the Adeptus Mechanicus, power-hogging, power-plays and vendetta among the High Lords and so on. It falls back on the attrition aspect MDG put so forcefully: once your disposition is legible to actors and powerbrokers in the Imperium, you get dragged into their games whether you like it or not - you either become a pawn of an established actor, or you become a player yourself, but in both cases your ressources are going to be expended to further someone's goals or to secure your own position. Just like bureaucracy expands to consume all ressources devoted to it, in the imperial power system there's always another war to fight or another plot to scheme, until your output is barely enough to keep the status quo togehter with duct-tape and WD40; it's the state every imperial institution inevitably ends up in, until they get wiped out by major, unplanned setbacks that they can't never recover from, that is. Cawl has the ridiculous headstart of 10.000 years of not being tied up in that mess, and that's his major advantage.

Crispy78 wrote:
It's a lore development that I'm not massively keen on, to be honest. I rather liked the idea that the 40K Imperium was a technologically-regressed society, desperately fighting to stay alive with poorly-understood and irreplaceable relic weaponry from the past. It provided some scant justification for the fascist dystopia that mankind had slid backwards into.

Nowadays it feels a bit more uncomfortable, in that the same fascist dystopia has shiny new kit and is now kicking arse and taking names across the galaxy.

I think that's just a phase really, used to up the ante and increase the stakes, it will regress in time. There are hints towards all sorts of problems for Cawl, from dissent brewing in the Adeptus Mechanicus to his (probable) meddling with traitor geneseed, and now with the events of AoO we have Chaos Primaris and corrupted Cawl-Stuff as well. I think this hints towards GW flip-flopping on what the CSM codex represents yet again, and maybe this edition will be the one we finally get a recently-turned Renegades and an veterans-of-the-long-war Legionnaries codex...

Overread wrote:
Also leaving room for the creative team to develop new alien threats as once cowed and hiding Xenos armies rise up.

I'd hope we see some more Xenos not only coming out of hiding to reap the spoils of a decaying Imperium, but also waves of them being driven before the Tyranid fleets and becoming refugees-cum-invaders out of desperation and necessity.

AtoMaki wrote:Reading some of the HH novels, I'm getting this idea that the Emperor wasn't even half as good as he claimed himself to be, and he was kind of a narcissistic bully who was successful because he was the only helicopter in a universe of stupid. So Cawltech being better than Emperortech isn't very surprising considering the latter is just a bunch of stolen (and usually sabotaged) stuff squeezed out from some randos (usually squatting in some ruins and making terrible life choices).

The Emperor got his scientific advances mostly by plundering stuff or by having his thralls develop it and then unpersoning them after they got the job done; he's not so much a great scientist as a great (and ruthless) manager of science programs: he offers his subordinates ressources and time to do their work, while he uses his warlord skills to keep distractions away and get enough slaves, raw materials and exotic stuff to keep his legions of Mengeles and von Brauns happily occupied. The big exception is his human webway project, which he mostly worked on himself, but rather out of jealousy and paranoia and less because he was the best available scientist.