Hmm... I'd say that Warriors' Gate gets away with it entirely because of the surreal presentation of pretty much everything aside from the privateer and its crew. The presentation here was pretty realist, even by Doctor Who's standards (compare with, say, The Beast Below) and I think that jarred.

I wasn't really counting in Oxygen which I agree with you was a strong story but suffered from not really understanding what it meant by capitalism, and so ended up tilting at a straw-man or at least at an economic model that many capitalists would also disagree with.

I think a single writer would have helped. I've taken part in a couple of fan-fiction projects which attempt to coordinate several writers over a multi-episodic structure and it is remarkably difficult to juggle what everyone wants to do, what everyone thinks is going on and making links between stories which are all being written more or less simultaneously so you don't exactly know what is going on in them. While this is a more professional under-taking with a show-runner who is not afraid to rewrite heavily where necessary, I imagine the problem of competing understandings and emphases remains. I'd be interested to know if there was a document at the start setting out what the Monks were or whether it was allowed to grow organically over the writing - it feels like a case of the latter and the previews in DWM have rather suggested that.