This is my regular reminder to stop reading 2/3 of the way through the book. It will feel like a traditional, abrupt Stephenson ending, but you will save yourself hours of time and potentially blindness-inducing eye-rolling.
The comparison would be Orson Scott Card writing Ender's Game to set up the universe of Speaker for the Dead, but instead making Speaker for the Dead a third of its size and calling it the last few chapters of Ender's Game. They should just be different works in the same setting.
I loved them both.