The best textbook on modern banking and finance I've ever read.

Which, I realize, is a really damning endorsement of a novel, but I honestly found it fascinating. Once I chewed through enough (roughly half) of the first book to the point that it was engaging.

And yes, its exposition was itself an exploration of the baroque.

Some of them are. Some of them are truly pointless. Neal Stephenson apparently had a giant map of 18th century London on the wall of the room where he wrote it, and as such apparently feels compelled, on certain occasions when a character goes from one place to another, to name every street he passes on the way. That's not atmospheric or interesting, it's just filler.

The point of Baroque architecture and music is to have too much detail at every level to take in - presumably he was trying the same thing in writing.