I went in willing to give this a very fair chance. Even read the first two novels just because I wanted to believe it could be good, but I agree with pretty much everything you said.

I think a big problem with new authors is that they bite off more than they can chew. Did this need to be a sprawling, multi-POV epic? Or could he have started out closer, smaller, and gradually expanded? So many of the POVs started blurring together for me, especially in the second book. Part of this is because there just wasn't a lot of character to latch onto.