I think what Midian is trying to get at - and if I'm wrong, I apologize - is that with most of those 1rst person stories, you already have your character established, and the fundamental issue of the stories is "What happens to X in this book?"
It is not to say that there isn't character development. Good writers tend to tweak their characters as they go along in a series, but there is a certain amount of immobility inherent in a series character. It's sort of like a band that does one kind of music. If they have already put out a number of prior albums in one particular musical style, if they then do an album that deviates from that, even when it is a good album, there tends to be backlash.
The fans expect a certain something, and if they don't get it, they turn hostile.
Whereas with 3rd person works, where you do not have recurring characters from book to book (though obviously these generalizations about POV are not always the case), there tends to be more of a focus on character arc throughout the story, because that's the focal point of the story. "How does what happens in the story affect X?"