Of course the answer is in those details--which I've read and which I've described small portions of, as you say, in other comments--but it's not the answer to the question you give. Dennett cannot be classified as an "eliminative materialist" about everything. That's a gross oversimplification. A better description is that he was a functionalist about some things (and one of those things is conscious experience), and an eliminative materialist about others.

There are even in-between things about which he was what one might call a "metaphorical functionalist"--for example, "mental images". Yes, we have the experience of having mental images and doing various things with them mentally, but when you dig down into the details of what is actually going on in our brains, the best correlates we can find for such experiences are only "images" in a metaphorical sense. So when people talk about their mental images and what they do with them mentally, while we can grant that they are describing their real conscious experiences, those conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains.

That last sentence, in fact, illustrates the kind of confusion Dennett's critics have about what he is actually saying. When he says things like the last sentence--that people's conscious experiences are not authoritative about what is actually going on in their brains--his critics claim he's saying that there aren't any conscious experiences at all. That is because his critics have an unstated assumption that our conscious experiences are authoritative about what is going on in our brains--that if we say we experience having a mental image, there must be an actual image somewhere in our brains, not just a metaphorical one. If we say we experience seeing blue, there must be an actual blue quale somewhere in our brains. And so on. But cognitive science, in many cases, offers no support whatever for such claims, and so in general we cannot take our conscious experiences to be authoritative about what is going on in our brains. We have to do the hard scientific work to check whether that is actually true in each case.