I dunno, man. SF exists as a lens to say something about people. The whiz-bang technology is...I want to say "wank", but I don't mean it pejoratively. That stuff just doesn't
mean much. I have great admiration for folks like Robert Forward as
people, but...once you take away the technology, they're not saying much. It's potboiler stuff. And that's fine, but I look at that, and then I look at somebody like Spider Robinson, whose inclusion in
Analog got Ben Bova no end of shitty emails, and...he's actually sayin' stuff. Like, you don't have to agree with it, but there's something, once you put the book down, that you can take away.
I don't care how hard your SF is: it is always and without exception about what technology does to people--otherwise it's an engineering manual for something that doesn't exist. A lot of the "greats" of hard SF never got that. (Forward, again, comes to mind.) I have a more charitable opinion of Egan than the OP does, to be sure, but I have a strong reaction to the notion that the human element of this should ever, ever be played down. Everything, ultimately, is about people. We miss that at our peril.
This is why most of Heinlein (the tail end of his career notwithstanding--we all know it gets weird, let it lie) still holds up so well despite so much of technology and society having changed in the interim. Even books that weren't trying to be hard SF (his juveniles, which IMO are some of his weakest books, tended towards this) had engineering and mathematical verisimilitude, but it was a concern set well behind the characters who had stuff to do and learn and grow through. (Most of the time. Lookin' at you, Red Planet.)