Well they went off piste! Until then they had been in or close to the track that George RR Martin had laid out.

Excellent analysis!

I did read the books on the original series. I have but haven’t yet read some of the others (I have at least one audiobook that was free at the time). I absolutely loved them, after sitting in shock as one “main character” after another was killed in a horrible and tragic way. I had gone in cold, and did not realize that GRRM took the authorial advice to “kill your darlings” quite so literally.”

I didn’t get into them until the pentology was finished, and I remember wondering to myself “Who the hell does he finish this? He’s introduced a major new plot line on the third book (maybe it was the Dorne subplot) and new, major characters kept popping up. I had no idea how he was going to start tying everything together, because even the last book had not started winding things down quite - the tensions were still building. It felt like he was painting himself into a corner while doing the floor like the ceiling of the Sistine chapel. Given the pace of subsequent development, I think I may have been just a bit right on that. I’ve done it to myself and recognize the symptoms.

I appreciate House of the Dragon being good. The problem is that S1 was also good. The problem is in the prequel-ness itself. I know that it all ends with Dany going inexplicably insane and Jamie’s arc goes from scoundrel to hero to … whatever the hell that was. I know the complex plot lines they’re setting up will never be closed. If GRRM ever finishes the book (I’m certainly not expecting two) and winds things down properly, I might again feel invested enough in the universe to try the other stories set in it, but right now it might have just ended with “and then Ned woke up and realized it was all a dream.”

Lastly, you raise a good point and that would have at least maybe delivered some interest. I can’t see anything but civil war with Bran as the bored and incapable god-emperor facing a Stark-Lannister alliance or something. The problem is that the most central and intriguing plot lines were left hanging or ended in the fastest and worst way possible.

“Dany forgot about the Black Fleet?” A queen capable of bringing her people from the literal point of extinction to conquering the known world, with a team of advisors and tacticians forgetting about a major armed force whose betrayal and push for conquest was well known? That’s like “The President of the United States forgot they were at war with China who had dispatched their fleet to attack Washington.” And then to have a ballista, fired from the pitching deck of a sailing ship, and hitting not only a moving target but a flying one? No one in history has ever shot a ballista at a moving flying target, to my knowledge, then pull in the wind and the waves.

I really only picked on Bran in particular because that was the ending-ending. From top to bottom it was absolutely terrible with every authorial decision worse than the last.

Like I said, I think GRRM painted himself into a corner. I think he gets some of the blame, because the show runners are obviously nowhere in the league of GRRM when it comes to story creation, and I don’t know how involved he was at that point. I don’t know if he skimmed a paragraph and signed off or what. Honestly, I don’t think even George knows how to finish his story because he kept adding one more thing. He’s a mature writer and gifted author, but I don’t have a competing hypothesis right now.

I do blame the showrunners for deliberately turning out an absolute piece of crap just to finish the thing even after being offered additional seasons by HBO. It was the worst example of deus ex machina I’ve ever seen.

You listed a lot of things that were foreshadowed largely in the books. I felt that the dialogue just about immediately fell off as soon as they ran out of book. Everyone felt very much on their own "tracks" and did not veer past that starting immediately with how they dealt with Jon just...coming back at the start of the season. Characters started teleporting wherever they needed to be, and episodes started feeling a lot more like a poor combination of big budget action scenes and desperate attempts to connect those by having two characters talk at each other alone in a room.

I feel like Jaime's failed redemption arc was missing something (maybe a couple books worth of further development and foreshadowing?) and the whole Bran debacle felt like it was really supposed to be something and they just "kind of forgot" to ever actually set it up.

I think there are some good reasons GRRM has had such trouble finishing the series and the show runners just never even noticed and steamrolled straight to the end.

It’s a beast to wrap up and hit all those notes and do it before the heat death of the universe. That’s why we haven’t gotten a book in a decade, and likely never will again.

The hubris to think you can do it in eight episodes of television? Unimaginable.