LKH Lashouts

I know I'm still new here, so let me know if I'm putting up too much stuff at once, but there was another point I wanted to make after my initial post last week.  After a couple of years of stewing about this author it's cathartic to finally have a place to post these things.  My bone to pick du jour is about the animal groups residing in the Lou.  While you could probably go on ad infinitum about how there are now far too many, my main concern is how they advance the plot (if at all).  
      The wererats, though underutilized now, fill a great niche in intelligence gathering and mercenary work.  The wolves work because how are you going to have vampires and not werewolves? After this, the relevance of the groups begins to dissolve.  It seems more and more (see a recent blog entry where she discusses cougars, I don't remember which) that LKH gets a passing interest in an animal and in the next installment Anita is boffing that particular beast and we're stuck with it forever mucking up the Anitaverse continuity.  To some extent the problem is just the same as it is in the rest of her writing in that she allows everything to become bloated and never thins the herd as it were, but that doesn't make it any more irritating.  I mentioned the werehyenas in my last post.  Where are they? They show up, posture, disappear again.  Their alpha NEVER shows up.  How many other groups are like that? This particularly gets under my skin because I considered the hyenas to be a really interesting idea until nothing came of them.
     The most persistent and blatant offenders however, are the wereleopards.  How can of the world's deadliest big cats become so flaccid and stupid in one woman's hands? Without exception (besides Merle and some new guy) they are sniveling children who can't move until Anita tells them to.  They do nothing to advance the plot (Nathaniel and Micah, in my opinion, are literally the worst characters created in modern fiction), and accomplish nothing in the narrative other than making you feel like you could probably beat up a wereleopard.  I know Gabriel was a pretty horrendous guy, but he was scary as hell, too.  I think LKH needs to drastically reduce the amount of shifters in her stories, or at least the ones that come onto centerstage, and focus on building those characters into something respectable.  Pathos is a wonderful thing, but at the end of the day these ARE supposed to be monsters, aren't they?

Anyways, i was basically wondering what everyone else here thought about the various lycanthropy groups (leopards in particular) , which ones could YOU do without? What do you want to see more of?