As boring as it is, I preferred the Lorenverse take on on Charted Space. It's hard to make your own stories even with an established background if that background goes in different directions than what you want (Yeah, so if going meta in PoD, you can wonder if the 5FW will distract the Imperial pirate hunting effort, or make Drinax refuse to use Imperial transponders (because, well, they go psycho and destroy the setting) or figure out how to avoid the oncoming Aslan wave).
In the standard Charted Space timeline it seems better to set something in Far Frontiers, The Beyond, or Vanguard Reaches, or going the other way, to Gateway where at least you have nothing written on when and how K'kree/ Lords of Thunder wave might arrive. Plus, small states, border wars, that kind of thing makes the setting more to the scale where dreadnaughts backed by 10,000 systems don't rule the day. Small state dynamics and TL10-13 seems more interesting to me and has room for both 'small' campaigns and 'large' ruler-scale adventures. Reavers Deep is another place where that could work.
Better to build that fairly static setting (I agree, a distant, vaguely sinister, and ineffectual Third Imperium should have stayed that way) as a basis. 2300 is also kind of broken by the Kafer invasion, depending on how it turns out (which again, is beyond referee control if you want to keep buying books). Also, I can't see using that setting since the Arms are based on old data, and placing a setting close to Earth makes the next discovered exoplanet a setting disrupter. If you want to focus on Sol, then it's better to have a universe with stargates or wormhole passages going to arbitrarily distant systems - you can still have star maps and trade routes, but with a few 'links' out of each system (like Alderson points, perhaps), a 2D map actually makes sense - there can even be J1 links and J2 links, etc., except it's the particulars of a higher level drive that make 'further' jumps possible.
If you're writing a story, it makes sense for your setting to be dynamic, but if you're offering a setting, then it's for others to tell the stories, and I think GDW, especially in its later years, certainly didn't get that. I bought stuff because that's what I do, but never actually did much with New Era or T4 because I hate the premise of.... can we call it T3? no, guess not... anyway, hated the Virus plotline and thought 75 years was too short of a period for a new era, especially with most of the system names changed because, why exactly? And T4 had the 'problem' of being a poorly produced 'historical drama' where the growth of the Third Imperium was a forgone conclusion and the data was all bad (hello First Survey...) That, plus the '90s were a busy and chaotic time for me, work and personal-wise, though I did manage to play in a D&D campaign for a couple of years, but no Traveller...
