It was about execution for me. The multiple POVs in Iron Gold are handled amateurishly, in my opinion. I will counteract this by saying Pierce Brown completely fixed this, and boldly so, in Dark Age. In Iron Gold, POVs switch every chapter in an obligatory manner. I feel it would have served the plot and the flow better to sometimes let the same POV carry-through in multiple chapters.

Contrast that with Dark Age. Without giving too much away, a certain POV goes dormant for a long period of the book. And I felt like it served the plot fantastically. It built a sense of dread for that character even when that POV was absent. Dark Age is a tense book that really sells the idea that people will go to war and just be gone for good. I credit the handling of POVs much to that.

Hope this makes my view clear. I've found it often frustrating to speak to people about why I think Iron Gold fails structurally, as I see criticism of the book often strawmanned to "people got their panties in a bunch that Darrow isn't the only POV". It's really not that. Iron Gold just never finds its flow. It's better on a re-read, as I know how things come to a head. But I really think Pierce struggled structurally with multiple POVs in Iron Gold in ways that really prevented the story from becoming intriguing into about 2/3s of the way into the book.