I feel a bit like Ellen Glasgow (I think it was) who said that she was the master and characters did what she said. I'm envious of authors whose characters become so real to them that they take off in their own directions, but my philosophy of teaching, as well as writing, is to demystify the process.
Scientists do their best work when they are in their early years. Writers' skills don't necessarily decay; if they can keep their interests and hopes alive (like Jack Williamson), their experience allows them greater depths to explore.
The compassion is instigated by the situation, and Godwin, a bit ham-handedly, belabors the situation so that there can be no doubt in the reader's mind, makes Marilyn sweet, young, and innocent (rather than a cold-blooded murderer or serial killer) so that reader will want to save her - and then the realization of "the cold equations" will be more effective.
In hard-core science fiction in which characters are responding to a change in environment, caused by nature or the universe or technology, what readers want to see is how people cope, and so the character are present to cope, or fail to cope.
A few years ago, a fellow professor stopped at my door and said, "You're here in your office more than my full-time colleagues," and I replied, "Writers don't retire, they just go out of print." With electronic publication, even that doesn't have to happen.
Return of the Living Dead.
What you call "the Golden Age tradition" of stringing stories together into novels was not so much a tradition as a consequence of the fact that almost no genre SF novels were published between 1926 and 1946.
I could give you some names of Workshop participants who are as good as many who are being published but haven't had the right editor recognize their merit or have not been adequately published.
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