Oh, wow, we are so on the same page, and I'm so relieved, because I've been wondering since I finished the series if people were going to think I was out of bounds for looking at the way they did up bb Shen Wei and thinking, "That boy is a teenager." Nor could I figure out why Shen Wei wouldn't have aged the necessary years to match the expedition timeline, while yet aging enough to be clearly older in the present than he was 10K years ago (though I always have to make allowances for what odd things he learns through that power of his). And it kind of feels like, the way they dropped the expedition storyline, maybe that's how they retconned it anyway (maybe he woke up, ordered the expedition, and immediately fell asleep for another six years, which would be why nobody followed up on the expedition when it went to hell). I suspect Shen Wei feels like he time traveled, which is what they're showing us with his ineptitude with technology and possibly both his formality as a professor and his...everything as the Envoy. I wish they'd had the budget and time to show us some similar details when ZYL went back, like trying to handle a sword or ride a horse (or maintain his carefully cultivated scruff without modern grooming supplies).

I like your statement about how the temporal dislocation would psychologically affect Shen Wei. It's what I was trying to say, but fibro and words don't always play nice.