That last point was something neither I nor my dozen readers had noticed, but the editor I hired did. It was such a major point that I decided the book needed a

That last point was something neither I nor my dozen readers had noticed, but the editor I hired did. It was such a major point that I decided the book needed a near-complete rewrite to fix. The editor was worth the money just for that one thing! You're definitely right about genre conventions playing a big role. That said, you can still say "I think the character hasn't suffered enough, but maybe that's normal in this genre". What I said about my own editor is actually interesting because they don't normally edit my genre, which was obvious in some aspects, but they could still point out the pacing / tension issue.