Apparently in the annotated edition Zahn compares Thrawn to Sherlock Holmes, which definitely explains why I like Thrawn so much. Thinking back to what we knew of Palpatine solely from RotJ, he cackles, but he also seems to have larger plots. Thrawn is all larger plots and no emotion, though it's interesting that Rebels played up him not understanding the Force when he certainly seems to be able to deal with Force-users well enough here.

I don't think I quite grokked that Karrde is meant to be a more successful, more jaded version of the "smuggler with a heart of gold" the first ten or 15 years of reading this book, but he definitely is.