I would agree with everything you said, however, I still liked the book and like all of the books in the series. The reason I like them is that once you get past the push at the beginning about why science is great and environmentalists are weird, you get to a story that does a pretty good job of explaining some advanced astronomy and physics stuff in a kid friendly way. For my DD she wasn't interested in reading true textbooks or other resources about astronomy, but she had so many questions about it that these books gave her a way to get the information in a format that she enjoyed. I don't remember the rest of the stories being so bad in terms of stereotyping the parents, but it has been a few years since we read them.
I think if I were to ask DD she too would say that they weren't written really well, but she loved the basic theme and the science being woven into the story.
