I would agree that Elizabeth Moon is good but I wouldn't call her books Space Opera just normal sci-fi, in the same way as Lois McMaster Bujold is.
I do enjoy E. E. Doc. Smith though.
As I said, no-one is writing classical Space Opera these days. And while I agree that Forester is not brilliant, he's still better than Weber. Patrick O'Brian is obviously way better than both. Forester is like Tolkein: most of the praise is for (re)inventing the genre, and putting all the little detail in. Not the (lack of) style.
But part of the problem is that the definition of "Space Opera" has changed over the years. The original definition goes back to the 1930s, where it was used to describe a now mostly dead style of SF which was clearly just the Wild West in space: lone astronauts travelling from planet to planet, righting wrongs, fighting aliens (i.e. Indians), etc, etc. Awake readers will realise that this means "Firefly" was Space Opera. This style kept going right into the 1950s with people like Jack Williamson. But the definition changes during the 1940s and 1950s to the "Doc" Smith stuff: big space battles, big space ships, big weapons etc. Everything on a grandiose scheme was the main requirement. Most importantly, it has almost always been a term of abuse, or at least dismissal.
The scale of books like the "Lensmen" is vastly bigger than anyone writes today, but for a
good reason. People wrote books like that back then because they were mostly useless at writing about people. And all great art is about people. Nowadays, even if huge events are happening (like Iain Banks tends to do) the focus is still on the characters, and the exploding planets are so far away that you can just casually mention them. So that little genre is pretty much defunct. The battles in Moon's books may be small, but almost no-one else has battles at all, never mind bigger ones.
