For me if I had to pick a good contender it would be the UK version of The Office.
I know many tend to debate how Ricky Gervais really fell off and how he repugnantly acts like a whiny centrist edgelord but me personally IMO I actually don’t think he was ever funny not even a little.
His big break through television was just so painful to sit through it’s so charismatically boring the characters are completely generic at best (notably Tim) or straight up insufferably unlikable at worst (especially the protagonist David FUCKING Brent) and most importantly the humour is just embarrassing.
Always seemed like The Thick Of It but without the nuisance tongue in cheek and charming satire.
And there is so much to that series of books in terms of complex topics that are dealt with in subtle ways that I don’t understand how they think it is Y/A.
To be clear, I only read the first book because I was not interested in reading more (read: actively annoyed that nothing interesting happened).
As for YA, that’s easy. It falls over the tropes (which, to be fair, it could have been early/first in). This post had been a favorite of mine for years, the “Protagonist” section is 2 for 3. Where it does somewhat lean out of the genre is its world, which is not just thinly-veiled school or the like.
As for what we actually see in the first book, though, we get an often-told YA story that happens to occur in an exceptionally well-thought out world.
Frank Herbert wrote the second book because, just like you, the entire point of the first book flew over a lot of people heads.
Ah. Shame I left it already wanting my time back for the first book