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As a former Hornblower enthusiast, I can not leave this uncommented! Actually, I think you have a very good point, although I never thought of it that way myself (but then I was only a kid at the time). Hornblower definitely has a modern sensibility in many ways (e.g. with regard to corporal punishment!), but I always thought of it as being ahead of his time rather than being an anachronism. Occasionally, Forester will go out of his way to put Hornblower squarely into his period, e.g. in his reaction to literature (he adores Pope and Gibbon and struggles with the romantic poets).

True, but his unusually liberal (for the time) political views, his rejection of typical nautical superstition (for example the passage in regard to the source of the equinoctial gales), his views on hygiene and regular bathing, his views on social matters and lack of insistence on the importance of authority, his less than respectful opnions about royalty (including George III, the future George IV, and the Czar, not to mention the King of Sicily) all place him in more of a mid 20th C context in my mind. I feel that O'Brien handled this matter, and the rendition of Napoleonic era idiom, much better.

That sometimes happens. I lost interest in both Riverworld and Dune after book 3. In many ways the world creation was the story. Eventually standard plot tropes are employed to layer onto that richly created world and the whole thing becomes predictable. But until that happens it's a good ride.

I haven't read O'Brien, only looked at his books, but from what I have seen, you are probably right. O'Brien seems to be a truly historic writer in a sense that Forester was not — he seems to have an independent wish to recreate the atmosphere and the language of the time. To Forester, I feel that history is more of a backdrop, and that his real purpose is character portrayal. He definitely doesn't want to be caught in a historical mistake as technical skill is very much at the heart of the Hornblower saga, but at the same time it is important to him that Hornblower seems a relevant character to the modern reader. I think Forester's son once said that Hornblower was Forester the way he would have liked to be, and I suppose that reinforces your original argument. For me as a boy, Hornblower was definitely me the way I would have liked to be — and that was his attraction much more than historical accuracy (although I did spend hours reading about British naval heroes in my parents' encyclopedia!)

O'Brien will give you a chapter on the ship's biscuit then another chapter on the weevil's that infest them. I like a rollicking good yarn myself rather than historical detail which is why I love the Hornblower stories. Alexander Kent is not bad and watch out for the chap that is writing the prequels to Treasure Island, John Drake. Best pirate yarns since Captain Blood!

I think that's been done before.

Losing interest in a long running series, especially SF or fantasy is quite common. Sometimes you get the impression they're simply churning them out because of the money (quite true in some of Raymond Feist's Midkemia series, he actually admitted that some of those were written purely and simply because he was going through a messy divorce and needed the money) or because they can't think of anything else. Farmer was an interesting writer. He was very interested in mixing erotic with fantasy. He created a great concept which has been developed as the Wold Newton universe in which writers expand on famous fictional characters. Farmer's interest was in Tarzan and Doc Savage (although he also did an Oz book called Barnstormers of Oz, I wouldn't recommend it for children), unfortunately I read one of the books and found it awful. It was like an action novel, but interspersed with regular references to how violence turned Tarzan on to the point of ejaculation, which he did on a frequent basis. In fact I think he and Savage duelled with their penises at one stage.

I'm surprised that I have never read a spanking story featuring Lord Greystoke, for Tarzan and Jane, let alone the innumerable High Priestesses and queens of lost civilisations that populate Burroughs' thirty-book-and-counting series (and I have to say that as a thirteen year old I never lost interest in that series) seem tailor made for the treatment. In Tarzan's Quest his entire family, including the monkey, take immortality tablets, so this should be a series that runs and runs.
I wanted to strongly endorse graves 94's original contribution to this thread. The use of onomato-whatsit to establish a rhythm or to be a bridging device between perspective shifts during the spanking is something I very much like to read. So long as the shifts are well written the repetition within reason of smacksmacksmack can give a lovely feel of remorselessness.

Oh, it very much is. In fact take any retro sci-fi, adventure tale and you have a world begging to have TTWD layered onto it. I have one here in the library.
Burroughs also wrote John Carter of Mars which actually does include a spanking scene or two around the 5th or 6th volume in the series.

I suppose one example would be John Norman's 'Gor' series - it started out as a normal fantasy barbarian adventure, then book by book included more 'slave-girl' scenes until now (I gather - I only read the first few books) it's gone completely kinky! Still, maybe that's what we should have expected from an author whose history includes writing a sex manual describing 15 ways of tying a woman to a radiator and a stint as Headmaster of a girls' school!