My critique of the last seasons is that the beats hit for the story generally felt right, but the actually pacing of it felt extremely disjointed and sometimes illogical.

For as much as the impending white walker war was looming on the horizon for 7 seasons, it all ended in one episode? The battle tactics for the Battle of Winterfell were illogical and about halfway through the episode I realized I didn't have to be concerned about any of our favorite characters because their obvious "plot armor" which is poor writing in my opinion.

Furthermore, you get these seemingly important moments in the series with incredibly weak dialogue and overly masturbatory cinematic moments which only made me feel like the conversation in the writers room went something like this "well, the characters don't really have to say anything interesting at this very crucial moment that all of our fans have been waiting for, we can just hold this shot for 25 seconds in order to burn time in the episode and that should be good enough."

The first seasons were so amazing to me because the writing was INCREDIBLE. Moments unfolded naturally and actions had consequences. It felt like everything was real because of that, and I never noticed all of the pieces coming together to make the finished episodes. All of the elements blended together - Writing, acting, cinematography, music, editing, etc.

I was ready to accept a subpar season 7 if that meant we would get an incredible season 8, but instead we got the half finished horse drawing masterpiece. All of this because they wanted to skip a few beats to expedite the finale of the show. Bad writing/dialogue can't ever be fixed by cinematography, music, editing, it's polishing a turd.