There are occurrences, I believe, when a character outgrows its author. I think Ender kinda did that to Orson Scott Card. I love Ender. He is in my view one of the best fictional guys I have had the pleasure to meet and follow. I believe his life is truly interesting and amazing and that in 3.000 years of his existence he has encountered and has spoken for some really magnificent people. However, Ender dear has not managed to find an author who could capture his amazing voyages. 
 1. The pace of the story is ridiculous. It is too slow for more that two thirds of the book and then it morphs into a jumbled mess of rushed revelations. 
 2. There are some very significant developments in the book which happen only so OSC could maintain the ridiculous pace. 
 3. The children are irritating, there are too many of them and they play too significant a role in the book titled Speaker for the Dead. 
 4. The priorities are screwed up - Speaker for the Dead is a book about a woman who had too many irritating children with the wrong man. Coincidentally, she had these children on a planet with some aliens. 
 Conclusion - I think this book could have been truly good. However, it ended up as being a bad love story interspersed with rudimentary anthropological ideas, a few basic cultural relativism issues. Nothing really ground-breaking and special. A road to a bad book is paved with good ideas.