I should note that when I said Claire is 'teh bestest' I meant current Claire, as in the Claire who seems to have undergone a massively transformative personal experience by having Dora write 'prioritize your needs' on the Coffee of Doom blackboard. The speech Claire makes in panel 3 of comic #4996 is not a speech the Claire of a thousand comics ago would have ever made.

@Ionathus is completely correct that the most recent comic, by any sort of objective evaluation, is of a person headed for a massive disaster of the personal, the professional, or both. However, would anyone here actually be willing to bet that Claire's going to fail?

That's the problem, and it's actually part of a larger trend in the comic in recent times, in that there's been a very strong tendency to misalign plots to scale. For example, take the Marigold case. The plot is that Marigold changes careers and this causes a realignment of characters in her personal orbit and offers a way out of retail for May. Reasonable enough on its face. The problem is that Jeph miscalculated and made Marigold a phenomenally successful vtuber of the sort that it makes no plausible sense given her personality, the overall timeframe involved, or her desperate concerns for secrecy. It happened in the AI assembly-line rights case too: Roko going on a 'drunken' rant was a perfectly in character thing for her to do. That doing so solved all their problems was ludicrous.

The current plot, wherein Claire goes on a journey of personal discovery that involves turning a bizarre holistic commune into something like a functioning research group by using good old-fashioned library know-how is, described as I just did, fine. The problem is that Cubetown is too big, too dysfunctional, and too alien for this to be at all reasonable.