One major issue with this series is that almost every single change to (as opposed to: expansion of) the source material makes the character(s) involved more stupid.
And to be quite honest, most of them weren't that well-endowed in the brains department to begin with.
Another issue is that they crammed 25 years of (what's basically) set-up into ten episodes. Some people feel that "not enough happened", but the truth is: a lot happened, and it was skimmed over.
This should have been two seasons with the big time jump / cast change between those two seasons... or (if they wanted to bbe a bit more daring) it could have been one twenty-episode season with a non-linear narrative. That is: they show the characters as "now" and "then" and they compare and contrast the relations between them in the different time periods to accentuate character growth, narrative progression and thematic relevance.
Either way, they'd have had ten more episodes to show a lot of stuff they skimmed over, like the War for the Stepstones. That could have been several action-packed episodes building towards a major climax. Instead, we literally skipped the whole war except the last day of it. (And of that, we still saw precious little.)
