> He was only 21 when he wrote the story, therefore hardly a skilled writer. He wrote all 70,000 words in roughly only a month, implying he never took the time to properly develop his ideas and refine his draft.

Let's start with some facts.

The Foundation "trilogy" which was published in the early 1950s was actually a collection of short stories that were published in the preceding decade. The book called 'Foundation' is actually a collection of the first four of those stories. The first one was published in 1942; the fourth in 1944. An additional opening story was written in 1951 for the collection.

So, he did not write all 70,000 words in one month.

At the time he wrote these stories (spanning his 20s), writing was a side hustle for him. In his main life, he was studying biochemistry at college, getting a job with a naval science laboratory (World War II was happening), being drafted into the army, getting out of the army, continuing his post-doctoral studies, getting a job at a pharmaceutical company. That was how his 20s were. That was the time he was writing those Foundation stories.

He didn't become a full-time professional writer until his early 30s, when he realised that his income from writing finally exceeded his income as a college associate professor.

It's also important to note the audience he was writing for. He wasn't writing for any book publishers. Almost no companies published new science-fiction books in the 1940s. The big market in that era was pulp magazines. He wrote on spec, and submitted stories to magazine editors.

> A prolific author, who published over 500 works of fiction in his lifetime, Asimov confessed that he had no time to read or write creative prose.

True. He was more concerned with conveying the story clearly, than writing fancy prose.

But his stories were popular. That's why they were collected into books in the early 1950s.

The reason they were popular was because of the ideas. Not the characters. Not the prose. Science fiction in those days was mainly about ideas, and Foundation had some great ideas.

Of course, the main idea was that the series would cover 1,000 years of future history, so there had to be a succession of characters from story to story. This also reflected the central assumption of psychohistory - that individuals don't matter. Form reflected function.

Apart from that, everything you complain about is simply your personal preference. You don't like Asimov's writing style. Other people do. It's as simple as that.