I enjoyed it. At the beginning I thought the beetles were kind of amusing for their simplicity of interaction. But as the story went on, and as they showed that they were perfectly capable of tricky negotiations and complexity, it occurred to me that we're not really any different. The beetles had, what, like 3000 plays to perform? Are humans really any different, apart from the fact that the Beetles have enumerated their kinds of interaction? The enumeration allows them to settle into familiar social routines very easily and also to lull outsiders into a false sense of security so you can whammy them with a surprise scene change, but with no less diversity of interaction than we experience.
I think that, really, a system like that would prepare young beetles to handle a variety of situations (from negotiations, armed conflict, seeking of mates, any number of other things) much more smoothly than human children do. It's like the beetles are playing the game of life with a huge deck of Magic-game cards--there's an appropriate card for every situation, and they can swap out the card as required. An individual beetle might need some experience to be able to choose the best card, but that best card is definitely in the deck and it's only a matter of practice and study to be able to sort it out.
The humans, on the other hand, are coming to the game with no cards. They can play any card in the deck, but they don't have the deck in their hands--they only know about the cards that they've personally played or had played against them in the past, and each human is going to have knowledge of a different subset--no single person would know every card.
At the point of this story, humans have some knowledge of the deck, but they mistakenly think that the deck is limited and that a free-thinking human can make a strategy that the beetles won't have a card to counter. In this story, at least, that does not happen. And I suspect will never happen, because the beetles are prepared.
Until a point when a human or group of humans can learn to fully respect every aspect of the beetles' language, to the extent that they can enter the game with the full deck of cards... until that point, humans are going to come out behind in every interaction.