Oh, absolutely. He was not a talentless hack - I just haven't seen any examples where he can get out of his own way. Your take on empathy in Androids, for example: I agree with it completely but at the same time, Deckerd is a wholly un-empathetic character. He's without sentimentality. And then when we see a replicant version of Deckerd, you're like "so what?" Personality-wise, they're indistinguishable. Yet the replicants act irrationally vindictive towards humans. The humans, by comparison, are matter-of-factly committing genocide against the androids. So yeah, "empathy." But the humans are the ones who act dispassionately while the androids are just mean. So yeah- signal in there somewhere. But it's positively buried under conflicting narratives and inexpert metaphor. Too much noise to get anything out of it unless you're looking for faces in the clouds.My take is that there's often signal in the noise.