Well that is fair enough, although there seems to be a lot of strong character work going into everybody else featured in the title - but then again Hope is the eponymous character to some extent, it's not unreasonable to want more focus on her.

I'm not sure you can point to low sales figures as a sign that the writing/plotting is off, though. I'm sure that's more a case of it being a book about 5 entirely new characters and one relatively recent semi-character/plot device, neither written or drawn by one of the blockbuster industry names; there's your recipe for failure. Great and interesting books along those lines crash and burn all the time, because there's no big name appeal.