Your last point, about classism in Heyer -- that pretty much nails down most of the problem that I have with a lot of Heyer's books. I expect this would be a problem with Regency romance in general, except that Heyer is just about the only Regency author I've read. But I also feel similarly about a lot of steampunk, etc. The characters are so privileged, so absolutely steeped in it, so unaware of it and so enmeshed in an authorial worldview that doesn't actually recognize it either ...

I think it causes problems for me as a reader because I find myself viewing the characters' shallowness, classism and obsession with (to me) intensely petty problems like "BUT WHAT DO THE NEIGHBORS THINK???" as character defects that are either going to be corrected or, at least, come back to bite the characters in the end, as they might in a modern novel. Except they aren't, and they don't; the point of the novels, in general, isn't to point out the characters' pettiness for thinking that their problems are the most important things in the world, but to join them in that worldview.

This probably makes it sound like I hate Heyer's books - but I don't! I really like her characters, and I think she writes well; it's just ... I really enjoyed the first one I read, and then found myself having diminishing amounts of enjoyment with every subsequent book, since I found the characters' society so stultifying, repressive and unenjoyable, and kept finding myself celebrating every small way in which they managed to break out of it, and getting frustrated with most of them for not wanting to.