I’ll maintain D&D may have been a victim of circumstance rather than incompetence.
They did a phenomenal job of translating massive books into TV seasons….then they ran out of books and only had an outline…an outline that even the author seems incapable of using to finish his series. The author even suggests the outline the tv series used is no longer valid.
So to me, D&D were in the unenviable position of taking someone else’s unfinished work, given no leeway in the story, and told to make chicken salad out of what may have been chicken s**t.
It does make me think D&D aren’t great at original scriptwriting but I would have been very excited to seem the translate Knights of the Old Republic from video games from video game to movie. I’d still be confident letting them make screenplays out of finished works.
I definitely don't envy their position, they were told that the books would be finished by the time they got to later seasons and wouldn't need to come up with anything original. The first four seasons were excellent adaptations and some of the best TV ever.
But later season writing was inexcusably bad. I know they couldn't have included everything in the books but some of their decisions about what to cut were pretty baffling. Entire characters and plotlines were dropped and never referenced again, setups were not given any payoff, everything happened way too quickly. I get that they were burnt out and tired, but condensing what will certainly be well over +2000 pages of content into 15 episodes just to finish for the sake of finishing was insulting to the entire fan base.
Like I said, I've never seen a series ending completely spoil the rest of the series in a way this one did. People didn't like the ending to the Sopranos, but you can still go back and watch the earlier seasons and it'll still hold up. Same with HIMYM and plenty of other shows with disappointing finales. But the GoT finale, IMO, completely ruins all of the great stuff that happened up through the end of Season 6 (which was a mixed bag, the spectacle in E9 and E10 was amazing but the early episodes were a whole bunch of meh). Watching S8 made me feel like watching the earlier seasons was a huge waste of time.