Dune etc had the advantage of a single author. The Mahabharata is a huge accretion of tons of third party interpolations .. every single wannabe guru with a new message found it very convenient to tack on some verses where bhishma, krishna, arjuna etc said "x was a good thing", or where "shakuni did y, and you all know what a sticky end he met" ..
Given that kind of third party meddling .. no wonder. What you are saying is like taking all the fanfic and third party takeoffs on dune and calling it all frank herbert's work. Mahesh Murthy wrote: > But when compared with more modern epics, MB has significant issues > from > some basic perspectives: character story-arcs aren't tied up neatly, > there > are many loose ends, and of course, the book-within-a-book with the > Gita > being there.
