Personally, while I prefer the story and characters of the Hand of Thrawn duology the outbound flight duology was better written and there were fewer parts I found boring. I actually believe that outbound flight could have been just a little longer and spent a little more time focusing on jorus sabaoths turn to the dark side and maybe added some mental manipulation to tie in with his clones behavior in the thrawn triology.

I haven't read Survivor's Quest so far, but I much prefer Spectre of the Past and Vision of the Future over Outbound Flight, both in terms of storyline and in terms of characters.

I found the Imperial antagonists in the Hand of Thrawn-duology a lot more entertaining and intriguing than several antagonists of Outbound Flight. Mara Jade's character development and the development of her relationship with Luke is also well done. I personally enjoyed the characters and the storyline of this duology in general.

I have more issues with Outbound Flight. While this novel, too, has some great characters (Lorana Jinzlerd, Thrass, Aralani, Jorj Car'das, Justyn Ma'Ning) and it does a good job at working already established characters into the plot, I thought the degree of interestingness and of quality of the different antagonists was mixed.

And I personally wasn't very fond of this depiction of Thrawn. I had an issue with several plot threads of this novel and quite a few of them were due to Thrawn's characterization in this novel.

As said before, I have yet to read Survivor's Quest, so, I can't really judge this duology as a whole so far. But, so far, Outbound Flight remains my least favorite of Zahn's novels with my least favorite depiction of Thrawn which is why I'm currently inclined to put the other duology above it

Survivors quest is the better of the two but it was released 1st and designed to be read first so most of the mystery will be already obvious to you now.

^That‘s good to know. I’m planning on reading Survivor’s Quest (it’s more a matter of „when“ than „if“). But that makes me look more forward it.

I suppose I just will have to live with already knowing the mystery. But I might enjoy it regardless. It might be even all the more fun to recognize characters or plot points