Writing this novel

I thought I'd finished it. But that was almost a year ago. Then, after several non-responses from prospective agents, I decided to get it professionally evaluated. Not edited. I think I can do that myself. With a degree in linguistics and another degree in education, plus nearly forty years experience teaching English, I think I can do my own editing. I'm not perfect. I can make mistakes as easily as the next person. And I know that I'm the worst person to do my own fault-finding when reading my own work. That is why I truly crave a critique group. Some people with similar goals and interests as myself. But an evaluation would be helpful.
Now, my master's degree in education was in curriculum and instruction, and included a lot of work on what curriculum and instruction evaluation looked like. But it seems that none of that applied to this manuscript evaluation. At the very least, I'd hoped the editor I paid to do the job would tell me if the story was worth rewriting or if I should just abandon it. But she said nothing about that.
She was, however, extremely helpful in other ways. She couldn't resist editing, though. Most of which I ignored because I didn't agree with her. Also, she didn't understand one of my main characters--the mother of the protagonist. That character happens to have serious personal flaws. Mainly, she is not a good mother. She doesn't listen to her daughter's concerns. She doesn't always remember to provide for her daughter's needs. She puts her job ahead of her parenting, and so on. That's who she is. That's one of the problems that my protagonist has to deal with. But my editor is a good mother. I can tell by the criticisms she has of "Fiona." So I have to seriously think about each comment she makes about the relationship between Fiona and her daughter in the story. It's most irritating, because I know my characters and how they have to interact.
Back to the helpful bits, though. My editor has a daughter in a wheelchair, and my main character is a teenaged girl in a wheelchair. So, although I've had a son in a wheelchair, and I've had a close friend in a wheelchair, and I've worked in a rehabilitation centre where most of the patients I dealt with were in wheelchairs, there's still a lot I don't know about life in a wheelchair. My editor gave me a lot of advice that was extremely helpful.
So now what? I'm still working on editing and rewriting this novel. I've been at it for about ten months now, and I'm only half way through the rewrites. I'm feeling totally lost, and very discouraged at this moment.
The other problem with this slow progress is that before I sent House of Secrets away for evaluation, I was already halfway through the first draft of the sequel! And I want to write a third novel with these characters to make it a trilogy.  If these books are going to take as much time as H of S, then I'll have to live well into my hundreds!!