Daemon and Freedom are top class hard scifi. The plot hinges on technical detail that is both completely plausible and a natural extension of existing information technology. It's obvious that Suarez really understands what he's talking about in a deep way. I'd say "Daemon" is top twenty for best hard scifi books. http://superkuh.com/hardscifi.txt
Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.
I found the books enjoyable, they're good techno thrillers and page turners like the Ramez Naam ones or Crichton's books but I think putting them into the top 20 is a little bit too much. Just taking a look at your list, Butler and Lem and Ted Chiang are on a different level.
I've recently been re-reading Daemon, and I find that it's very dated to the Windows XP era. As for Freedom(TM), I think it goes too far with its extrapolations from then-current technology. To name just one example, speech recognition and human-sounding speech synthesis were nowhere near as good as they were portrayed in that book.
Funny you should bring up "Daemon", I just tried to read it. If anything, I found the writing focussed too much on accurate details at the expense of good storytelling. As the plot was no secret, and the concept fairly trivial, I gave up pretty quickly.
I appreciated the science that went into Delta-V but I just couldn't enjoy the book itself. Random things happening that provide continual doses of danger and excitement I can deal with. But main characters making engineering decisions that seem designed to provide that less so. And secondary characters whose only motivation I could figure out was to keep up that same danger and excitement just ended up making the book unenjoyable for me.
I found it very definitely a light read. It's a fun romp into 'what if we did asteroid mining like right now'. Characters are fleshed out enough to tell that story, I didn't find anything preachy or cartoonish, and I didn't spot any idiot-balls or other fake-danger tropes of SciFi.
100% agree that Daemon and Freedom are top-class plausible hard sci-fi, which is surprisingly hard to come by. On the other hand, I didn't much care for Influx.
I'll take these as unsolicited strong recommendations for my next sci-fi novel reading, as I'm just finishing the Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space trilogy. Thank you!
Delta-v is good scifi and I love this kind of background detail.