Dune prequels: Was Norma a case of lazy writing?

I think its because Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson are terrible writers. Especially when compared to Frank.

According to them, she was around before the coming of Muad'dib. She was seen as a goddess by the Navigators. Yet she is never once mentioned in the original novels.

Brian and Kevin took everything that Frank was setting up, then flushed it down the toilet. The menace the Honored Matres were fleeing wasn't machines; it was advanced facedancers. Even if Frank had intended for the great enemy to be thinking machines, it sure as hell wouldn't have been those two clowns Omnius and Erasmus. There would have been no need for something like a Norma Cenva if Frank had been able to finish the series himself.

Norma was mentioned in the Dune Encyclopedia, which Frank gave his full blessing to. It is out of print. Brian and Kevin decided to cut the Encyclopedia out of Dune canon - even though they stole many ideas from it, then twisted those ideas to fit in their retarded version of the Dune Universe.

In the Encyclopedia, Norma was an accomplished pilot who used melange and computer brain implants to navigate ships. She died after the implants caused her brain to short circuit. She wasn't some superbeing who was more powerful than Muad'dib or Leto II.

She was plot armor for two guys who write stories like a teenager would.

Edited because my rant seemed a little unhinged. I also corrected some grammar mistakes.

Also to add, from the Dune Encyclopedia:

CEVNA, NORMA (148-78 B.G.): Ixian shipwright
and navigator, "Foster-mother of the
Spacing Guild." Norma Cevna was the most
original and brilliant of the Ixian refugees who left that planet in search of a world on
which to solve the problem paramount in
their minds: the reunion of mankind by developing
a computerless interstellar navigation
system. Cevna's common sense and intelligence
complemented the ferocious energy of
her lover, Aurelius Venport, and the two of
them made possible the later organization of
the Spacing Guild, with all the effect on
mankind which that implies.
On one of the stops during the wanderings
of the Aurelian exiles, Cevna accepted among
their number a woman wbo claimed to be
outcast from the Bene Gesserit, one Danlanius
Leona Shard. The identity, purpose, and influence
of the alleged ex-Reverend Mother
are some of the many mysteries surrounding
the early history of the Spacing Guild, but it
is clear that Leona and Cevna became close
friends, establishing a comity that was later
to direct the course of the exiles' research. On reaching Tupile, the exiles began to
dev~lop a navigation system that.would overcome
the greatest handicap caused by the
Butlerian Jihad-die loss of computers. Cevna
devoted her time to the design. of hyperspace
ships; she also became the fim known pilot
to experiment with the use of melange iri
ship directic:m. Through her friendship with
Leona, Cevna learned the ways of the Bene
Gesserit, llut only those techniques that would
realize the navigational ·potential· of spicetrance
prescience. These studies strained her
relationship with Venport, as the anonymous
Aure/iml Memoirs relate. Venport supposedly
said, "You spend altogether too much
time with the Gesserit witch; it works to our
harm,"· to which Cevna replied, "No, it
works to our help; not only will I give you
your ship, I will show you how to guide
it-pick the farthest star, and I will take it
there and bring it back" (p. 166).
_And she kept almost all of that grandiose
promise. Using the industty rebuilt by Venport,
she designed the first Guild ship, The Golden
Advem (legend has it that Cevna christened
the ship for Ve!\port's dream of the return of
travel, and in his honor, playing on the
meaning of his name; Venport, so the legend
goes, Wlltlted to call it. the Jehanne Be
Damned}. When the ship was completed in
84 B.O., ambitious, even revolutionary in its design, Norma Cevna piloted it on its
maiden voyage, and in this promise she
failed in part, through too heavy a reliance
on technological traditions.
As both designer and accomplished pilot,
Cevna was to serve as both captain and
navigator, but she was suspicous of the reliability
of melange and unable to free herself
entirely from the allure of man/machine
interfacing. Simply put, she intended to shortcut
her way through the many problems still
to be solved by replacing the computer with
her own spice-heightened brain. Terminals
were implanted in both hemispheres of Cevna' s
• cerebral cortex; she was thus physically linked
to the guidance subsystems slaved to the
.ship's Holtzman Drive generators. While the
right hemisphere dropped the ship into The
Void at the spice-directed exact moment, the
left hemisphere navigated by shifting masscompensators
mounted on a universal gear.
The Golden Advent reached the test destination
on schedule, but Cevna suffered increasingly
(and silently) from the strain imposed
by her dual role, as the others on board
thought. The real cause was much worse:
electrical "minicharges" were sympathetically
induced in her brain by the implanted
electrodes, and her spice prescience caused
her to "foresee," albeit subconsciously, the
trauma these charges would cause. The physiological
effects are a matter of medical
conjecture, but experiments on laboratory
animals suggest that in such a situation,
spice-awareness causes functions to be shunted
from one hemisphere to the other in an
attempt to maintain the functions and to
minimize damage. But Cevna's constant ·connection
made a feedback loop unavoid&ble,
and the condition spiraled upward in intensity.
When the return voyage was nearly completed,
Cevna went into convulsions like those of
grand ma/ epilepsy. Venport had to drop the
ship into normal space and complete its
return on back-up systems.
Doctors on Tupile eventually diagnosed
her condition as induced cortical epilepsy, but her seizures continued despite their best
treatments. As a last resort; they separated
the two hemispheres by cutting the corpus
callosum to halt the continued shifting of
functions. The seizures stopped, but Cevna's abilities were pennanently crippled. She fell
into depression and retired from active life;
when Venport failed to return from his test
flight of 79 B. G., she declined rapidly and
died the following year.
Nonna Cevna's contributions to the Spacing
Guild cannot be overestimated. Although
little remains of her original designs, she
showed that melange could stimulate the
human mind to replace the forbidden computers.
To gain this knowledge, she paid the
greatest possible price.