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I enjoy those books for how weird and unique they are. They remind me of Star Trek, where great men solve problems by calmly discussing philosophy over a conference table. But I agree with you that a lot of the characters end up sounding exactly the same. (To be fair, he wrote them when he was quite young, and just trying to make some extra money on the side while going through grad school)
I do think there's a bit of a contradiction built into them. The whole premise is that humans, at the large scale, are ultimately predictable: individual decisions don't matter, and there are no great men of history. But the entire plot depends heavily on the actions of Hari Seldon, and a few other great men who think and act just like him. So... what's up with that?
Admittedly, Asimov attempts to square this circle by a couple of weird and weirder turns later in the series.Essentially, Seldon cheats a little. Psychohistory is not perfect at predicting, but by looking deep into math psychohistorians gain psionic capabilities, and there is a secret Second Foundation of telepaths guiding the first one in secrecy. Also, later, robots are involved. Which should remind everyone that all of it is science-y fiction written by a well-read biochemist, not a real grand sociological theory.
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With the possible exception of Seldon, all those “great men” are interchangeable and thus not actually “great.” If they had been killed by a freak spaceship crash, Seldon’s charted course would continue with someone else at the helm. I do agree that the narrative kind of undermines this by focusing on personal action.
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Some critics hold that stories can be divided into two types: plot-driven and character-driven. In my view, the Foundation stories, especially the early ones were way on the plot-driven side of the spectrum. The characters weren't that interesting, and that's fine. I think science fiction fans tend to be more interested in plot-driven stories, especially world-building.
For what it may be worth, I had kind of assumed that this was an intentional and unspoken irony in the story. That notwithstanding his theories, Hari Seldon had a massive impact, as an individual, on the history of the Galaxy. But in hindsight, maybe it was just the fact that regardless of whether a story is plot-driven or character-driven, the story is going to be much more compelling and interesting if the actions of individual characters have an impact on the outcome.
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There's basically three types of "great men" in the Foundation books. There's the ones who can learn psychohistory, and they really do fit the "great men of history" historian-speak definition, figuring out how to steer history using what they learn. There's the ones who can't learn psychohistory (either because they're just not among the galaxy's geniuses and/or because the psychohistorians deliberately kept it from them to keep their steering from being upset), and a society full of the latter is basically running on History From Below rules with no Great Men in the historian-speak sense, despite having great men in the colloquial sense. And there's [redacted due to spoilers], who don't appear for a while, for Watsonian "that was really improbable until whole centuries had elapsed" and Doylist "the arc plot really needed a twist by the time whole books had elapsed" reasons.
After Hari Seldon, the "great men" in the Foundation stories are basically the people whose skill is "be clever enough to realize that there's only one solution to the crisis besetting them, then use it" at best, and it's not even clear to what extent that's necessary because there are other cases where the heroes fail to see the right solution but it essentially enacts itself under their noses.
I think my criticism is that, even with the second type, their history didn't evolve because of any sort of deterministic, psycho-historian type play. It still seemed to rely on some individual doing a stroke of genius, like the mayor with his "violence is the last refuge of the incompetent" saying. Good thing they had that genius mayor or they all would have been annihilated by their more violent neighbors, regardless of their more advanced technology.
A rough real-world analogue is Marx. He had this whole complex theory of how society would inevitably evolve into Communism, regardless of what individuals did. But revolutionaries like Lenin seemed to take matters into their own hands, and relied heavily on a few powerful men taking very specific actions, which weren't at all pre-determined!
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