There is a lot of great advice in this thread. Unfortunately, it is not helpful to Talakeal in the slightest, as it completely misses the actual issue at Talakeal's table.

Talakeal's players don't want to play the kind of game Talakeal wants to play. They don't want to be challenged. They don't want to get into nitty-gritty details on how to make something work. They want to play a power fantasy where they win without breaking a sweat. But Talakeal doesn't enjoy GMing that kind of game, as has been established in multiple previous threads.


When the players aren't interested in the social scenes, all the advice in the world won't help you improve those scenes, as the players will never take an effort. This is compounded by the fact that the group has a dedicated face, as "no one else is comfortable talking in character." That encourages everyone but the face to check out completely during these scenes, as it is "Brian's turn to play." You can mititgate that a bit by not requiring people to actually RP when you know they don't feel comfortable doing so, and just let them give some bullet points on what they want to touch on in a conversation without requiring them to act it out. Or you can continue to insist on in-character speak and be surprised when people react negatively to that.

Ultimately, I think the players have different expectations for what is required to find a solution. For them, "we'll go and ask the Sidhe for help" was the solution to the problem "BSDs are amassing an army." So when they went to the Sidhe, they went with the expectation of "we've found the solution, now we can get to the action." And then you tripped them up by requiring them to work for that solution because for you, just going to the Sidhe wasn't enough, you wanted the Sidhe to be convinced. Of course the players then got frustrated because the thought process was "But we found the solution! Why is Talakeal making this so difficult now? He must not want us to succeed!"
In other words, your players are trying to solve problems on a broader level then you want them to. When you try to get them to the deeper level you want them at, they feel like you're deliberately obstructing them. I've played with people like that, although in my case it was only one player acting like that, so the other players would pick up the slack where necessary. Funnily enough, I've also played in the reverse scenario; I was a player in a group where the GM expected us to solve things on a broader level than we wanted to. Which meant everything was far too easy, leading to frustration as we, the players, felt like we were not challenged enough.