Cerita I am v jealous, of all of it but especially the actual sheltering in a hut!
I wonder if contemporaneous readers were more keen on EBD's favourites? I know we've had a number of people on this thread who liked Jo, at least, as child readers. (I was less opposed to her then, but she's never been someone I particularly liked - I suppose as a child, I thought of her as someone I wouldn't much like IRL, and now as an adult I dislike how she occupies centre stage and how all other characters seem to adore and need her.) I don't dislike Len, apart from her engagement, but she's a long way from being a favourite of mine - even for the later books, where the competition is hardly much.
On the proliferation of boy names, and (related, I think) tomboy characters - I'm not at all familiar enough with girls own, beyond CS and very vague memories of EB, to be certain of this, but I think it's very characteristic of the genre. I'd personally quite like to read lesbian or gender-bending subtexts, and/or subversive awareness that the possibilities for boys were far greater than those for boys, and accordingly the possibilities for boyish girls, or boy-named girls, were greater, but I don't think that's at play here.
I do have to say that I really like EBD's sense of balance here - the boyish shorts are always counter-balanced with more feminine names (Daisy, Rosalie, Sybil), it's OK to be a tomboy (and you don't need to grow out of it - Tom still appears to be a v masculine character as an adult, and Nell and Nancy at times are written quite butch I think), it's equally OK to be more traditionally feminine (contrast EB's treatment of stupid fluffy girls), there's no obvious correlation between boyish/girlishness and cleverness, or being a nice person, and when Tom arrives full of crap about male superiority Matey (as well as the other girls) promptly squashes it. I think there are plenty of much later books with much more damaging messages in this respect.
I find some of the dropped threads really frustrating. I often get the impression - with the exceptions of Exile and Three Go - that EBD wrote very much on the hoof, with little to no planning, and no redrafting either. I think there are positives to this - I think often her characters are so good that 'lazy' writing enables them to better shine than when she's clearly consciously got a certain bee in her bonnet and writes lengthy speeches about the virtues of domestic science or whatever - but, especially if the hinted-at story sounds particularly interesting, it is v annoying to see it suddenly forgotten about.