Book Review: Ramage's Challenge

There have been several commercially successful attempts to fill the niche left by C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels.
Most obvious these days are Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, which generally have a better period feel than the competition, but leave me wondering if they're actually really good or just horribly pretentious.
Alexander Kent's Bolitho novels are less ambitious in a literary sense, and cover our hero's whole career as a clone of Nelson, but are, err, not all that good.
Then there are Dudley Pope's Ramage novels, following the adventures of Nicholas Ramage, son of the Earl of Blazey, etc from lieutenant to skipper of a 74 gun ship-of-the-line. Although there was always a touch of Conan the Sailor in the Ramage books, and his merry crew of loyal cliches were notable for never taking any casualties, I liked it that the stories individually covered only short periods of time and were in themselved relatively unambitious. (Although the death toll in French frigates over the series is quite absurd).
Then, over the last couple of days, I read Ramage's Challenge, one of the later books in the series.
Seriously disappointing.
I'm wondering if all the others are really just as bad or if Pope was just off his game here. The infodump on Italian history, Italian geography, how to load a gun and whatever is painfully intrusive (the writer clearly loves this part of the world). The sheer wonderfulness of the hero (and the way nearly everyone, from lowest seaman to admiral, recognises this) is tedious. The story lacks anything resembling a surprise.
Maybe I'm just complaining that the book achieves nothing but what it set out to do, be a simple Napoleonic War naval adventure.