I like Mirror Dance, but my reading order was weird because The Warrior's Apprentice was too much young bouncy Miles and spaceships and I stopped for 2 years until I happened to find Komarr in a charity shop, then read Civil Campaign and then worked backwards in loops of about three books at a time, finally ending with WA, which I could cope with by then in the light of the others. So Mirror Dance for me was more like the later ones. I can see it's a jump if you're coming at it in the other direction like you're supposed to.

novel about identity and consequences which just happens to be set in space
That's a good distinction. I wasn't a SF reader when I was young apart from Wyndham and LeGuin, which are much more books about something else that happen to be set in space/the future/somewhere else.