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GRRM purportedly told the showrunners exactly where the show was going. But because he didn't flesh it out at GRRM levels of detail, the showrunners had to fill stuff in and didn't. Why did Daenarys turn evil? Clearly GRRM told the writers it's because all the people she loves get killed and she suffers a lot. But if he were to actually write it, he'd realize that Missandei getting killed isn't narratively sufficient.
It's the same reason that a lot of "software architect" type people are kind of disastrous - if they actually sat down and wrote code instead of making diagrams and saying "fill in the details", they'd realize where the actual hard parts live.
GRRM could probably have made it work, though maybe 2 books would have become 4. The TV writers couldn't.
The showrunners have shown they can fill in Martin's skeleton in the past: S1 had some great non-canon scenes, and there are well-received TV-only plots (like Arya meeting Tywin in S2)
The problem imo is that GRRM's entire plot has spiralled out of his control and he keeps adding new and new plotlines to push things forward. This is fine for GRRM because he explicitly left TV to not have writing constraints. However this is obviously a problem for a TV, even the one with the largest budget ever.
Disclaimer: everything after this is well-worn fandom speculation.
In this case the problems in GoT are likely due to the showrunners - understandably- removing major characters like the alleged surviving Targaryen heir Aegon and his Dornish allies. Why? Cause we'd have to go back to Dorne and explain just how this Targaryen hid for years just like Dany, maybe adding seasons to the show and annoying the audience.
The problem is that roles like this are likely pivotal and its absence explains a lot of weird things.
For one: why Cersei has permanent support despite her actions which are so norm-breaking I can't think of a real-world precedent. In the books, if this happened, Aegon and his wife (lovelier than Cersei) would likely depose her and they'd be the threat to Dany.
This actually makes a lot more sense: Season 7 and 8 basically butchered Tyrion and Varys' characters to provide some justification for why Dany wouldn't just destroy Cersei instantly to much rejoicing (this causes the attendant problem that any/all warnings about Dany going evil aren't credible until she does something ludicrously over the top)
However, Dany's reticence would make sense if she was dealing with a fellow Targaryen pretender to the Throne. She actually can't just roast him. And his existence is the perfect thing that would cause her to be insecure and/or slip up.
I think there's sort of a cascade of problems like this, due to having to deal with an increasingly spiraling Martin plot. A plot that is so dense and complicated and unworkable that Martin literally scrapped a lot of work that didn't go well and hasn't successfully put out a book since Dance With Dragons. So I actually wouldn't be convinced that Martin can do it in two.
As I said:
Fair enough. Then I should say: I'm not convinced that Martin can do it at all (especially given that the "split the books up" was tried for Feast/Dance and we've been stuck for a decade)
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Could you give more detail? In my (biased) experience, they're normally competentish (if given to trends and overcomplicating things). Generally they've been developing for a decade+ before taking the role, from what I've seen. There are however many PMs or such who misrepresent/get overly stuck to diagrams and i've met some people who managed to become architects without coding at all. At my work, I make architectural mvps with seniors with chunks of the functionality and low effort piping, then tell other juniors how to make everything production ready while seniors work on hard parts we aren't quite sure about.
But fundamentally it's an organizational issue. 10 experts alone could very well be better (and in some projects, I'm able to give parts each to domain experts who write their parts in a week and it's all done (waterfall can work!)). But engineers are normally at the behest of non-tech people coming up with stupid features, who change their minds, or the domain space isn't even properly explored with exploratory test models (so we can't do good engineering practices). But this can be justified, since the tech is supposed to automate away concrete tasks and processes, for people who are paying for it. Path of least resistance etc.
So I'm referring to software architect types who probably are competent, but also aren't doing a lot of coding anymore. The net result is grand plans that often fail, or succeed but overbudget, due to a lot of stuff just getting bogged down in bad ergonomics and day to day tasks that are harder than they should be. As a concrete example, I once worked on an ETL task run by a high level architect plus a bunch of fairly junior folks.
ETL tasks just dragged on, took forever, had lots of errors. One of the biggest errors was simply importing stuff to the wrong column, because the developer actually mapping json -> SQL had to manually map "input field_name -> integer column position in CSV file -> SQL loads the CSV". After about a year of delays due to transposing columns (
return [...20 columns...row['foo']['bar'], row['baz'][0]...]when it should have beenreturn [...row['baz'][0], row['foo']['bar']...]), a clever (new) junior dev finally figured out developers should just doreturn { 'foobar': row['foo']['bar'], ...}and wrote the system to translate 'foobar' -> column 23 by just checking the column order in SQL. Another example would be days added to any ticket just because setting up a testing env is a lot harder than it needs to be.The key point here is that in neither case did the architect actually spend much time actually doing the task that was dragging on and slowing the project. If they spent a month doing that, they probably would have just fixed it without much notice. And once we got that one clever guy, it did get fixed.
As it relates to this example, from what I've read, GRRM is actually good at the details of writing. But since he's retired from writing, he's put into the "clueless architect" role, and the actual people doing the implementation are just not able to actually fill in the details.
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I have only very rarely worked with an architect who is competent. Most of the time, it's someone with little to no experience actually doing the technical work, who gives these high-level pie in the sky statements like "the system will take in lead, and output gold" with no indication whatsoever of how it should do that. Then they dust their hands off, go "OK your turn now" and leave it to the technical people to figure out how to actually make that happen.
I'm not saying competent architects don't exist, I've actually worked with some! But they are very much not the norm in my experience.
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