2 kinds of big novels

I’m going to get it out of the way by saying that Moby Dick doesn’t fit into this way of dividing big novels, because Moby Dick is more than a novel—it is 3 books put together (a novel, a whale encyclopaedia, and a philosophical book), and the story is only a small part of the book. 
Some recent articles and posts about big novels have made me think about them and storytelling, and I’ve come to the conclusion that big novels can be roughly divided into 2 types. 
The 1st type is the multiple-strand novel, which is essentially several novels put together. An example is Anna Karenina, in which we have the Anna strand and the Levin strand. Some characters belong to both sets of characters, such as Kitty or Oblonsky, but the Anna plot and the Levin plot are separate. 
Middlemarch is similar, which has 3 main plots: Dorothea- Casaubon, Lydgate- Rosamond, and Fred-Mary. Again, they sometimes intersect, but each of these plots can function as a novel on its own, even though the Fred-Mary one is thinner in comparison. Daniel Deronda is a better example, in which the Gwendolen Harleth plot and the Daniel Deronda plot only touch. 
Little Dorrit is less clear, but once I wrote that there were 4 strands of story in it: the Marshalsea prison, the Clennams, the bureaucrats, and the Marseilles prisoners. The line is more blurred, compared to Anna Karenina or Daniel Deronda, and Arthur Clennam connects all 4 plots, but they are separate—the world of the Clennams is distinct from the world of the Marshalsea prisoners and the Dorrit family, for instance, and the plot of the Marseilles prisoners is the one that stands out the most. 
Now look at War and Peace, it is different. It is the 2nd type, the one-big-story novel. War and Peace has 5 families and about 500-600 characters—they are all inter-connected and their lives are intertwined. Some readers speak of the War part and the Peace part, but they are just separate by location and action—they are not separate in the sense that they could be different books put together, especially if we look at characters such as Andrei and Nikolai. Andrei and Nikolai are not points of intersection of different strands the way Arthur Clennam is in Little Dorrit—their lives unfold in both the War part and the Peace part. 
A better example is The Tale of Genji, which is longer than War and Peace but tells a single story of Genji with his women and children. I’ve been told that about 2/3 or 3/4 through the book, Genji would die and the author would move on to tell the story of his children, but that would be a continuation. The entire book tells a single story—there are about 400 characters in the book but most of them relate to Genji one way or another. At least till he dies, Genji is always the central character, even if Murasaki Shikibu switches between perspectives. 
I think the 2nd type is harder to write. With the 1st type, you’re essentially writing 2 or several novels at the same time—you have to move back and forth between the plots, but generally speaking you’re focusing on one set of characters at a time. In contrast, when you write the one-big-story novel, the characters are not divided into different sets and you have to juggle with everyone at the same time. In The Tale of Genji for instance, Murasaki Shikibu must have full control over her 400 characters—what they’re doing, where they’re living, how old they are, when they move from one residence to another or how they move from serving one person to another, and so on. She has to keep track of passing time, age, seasons, festivals, amount of mourning time after a loved one dies, etc. and has to keep track of everyone’s age and changing titles as well as their relationships with each other. 
There may be some works that are hard to categorise, but I think big novels can be roughly divided into these 2 types.
What do you think?