To a degree this is true, although most analysis put Archers on the front lines and cavalry in reserve, as at the battle of
Battle of Hastings.
The front lines were archers with a line of foot soldiers armed with spears behind. There were probably a few crossbowmen and slingers in with the archers. The cavalry was held in reserve, and a small group of clergymen and servants situated at the base of Telham Hill was not expected to take part in the fighting.
The thing is, why the heck are they using pike and shot formations when they don't have any gunpowder to supply the shot part?
Crossbows (or longbows) played the part of the "shot". Soldiers in 15th century typically had relatively good armour, which means that direct fire was the only way arrows or bolts were going to have
any effect. Because of this, "shower" shooting over the heads of friendly melee infantry was no longer an effective way of employing archers - though it was still used as a harrassment tactic - meaning that missile troops had to have a clear line of sight. And this led to the "sleeves of shot" deployment pattern, as seen at Crecy and Agincourt:
As well as deployment used by Matthias Corvinus:
Compare this to 10th century Byzantine infantry square:
Now, you could still deploy both melee infantry and archers in the same line...
but that meant rotating the ranks, so that archers are deployed in front of the heavy infantry in opening phases of the battle, and retreat behind it as the enemy nears the melee range. This was not used very often, presumably for the same reason that pike-and-shot formations didn't do such rotation very often either: it was difficult to pull off. Note that at Hastings Normans were attacking, so they had the luxury of choosing how to fight. In any case, it will have looked something like this:
Last possibility of course was to deploy archers ahead of the melee troops in a completely separate body - but that risked running into difficulties which French experienced, where retreating crossbowmen impeded the advance of French men-at-arms.
The same way I explain armies of hundreds of thousands of soldiers surviving with no baggage train and supply, or people sometimes travelling hundreds of miles in a few days: The world is very unrealistic and poorly designed, so elements like a massive 30-ship pirate fleet get thrown in even though there's no reason for such to exist.
That is very definitely true. Still, fact that Martin didn't think things through doesn't mean those things don't have implications.
The trade cities are similarly bizarre. Qarth is in the middle of a desert wasteland with no farms nearby to supply it with food. It's a port city with no actual reason for ships to stop there, there's no trade routes leading to it (due to being in the middle of the Red Desert) and no rivers to ship grain in barges to it. More importantly, trade doesn't have any influence or effect. The leaders of Westeros sneer at "merchant houses" indicating that they're not using mercantile interests to make money. We also see no mercantile interests in the councils indicating that there's no important non-noble guilds or merchants to influence politics. Consequently it's difficult to say merchants exist in any real form since they have no influence. You can make a reasonable argument that said merchants exist in areas like Braavos but they have no influence in the plot. Saying that Game of Thrones is early modern because an area that the plot doesn't happen in is nearly there is like saying that you've written a sci-fi thriller where the sci-fi and thriller parts all happen offscreen and 90% of the book is set in an Amish farm and looks at the family's cheesemaking process.
Qarth
sits at the mouth of a strait, so that
would be enough to explain city forming in normal conditions - look at the case of Singapore. Still, the fact that it is in the middle of the Red Desert means that it wouldn't be able to survive, and as you note, Martin has essentially eliminated everything except nobility from Westerosi social structure (where are merchants? Free royal cities? Cities as political entities?).
Essentially, what we are dealing with here is a political entity the size of Roman Empire, with cities the size of Ancient Roman cities, fielding armies the size of Imperial Roman or Early Modern armies, showing Roman logistical capabilities, yet doing all of that on socioeconomic and political structures / foundations that will have looked primitive in the Dark Ages.
Personally, in order to avoid aneurysm, I usually choose to go with what Martin
has shown us, and simply assume that things not-shown-but-absolutely crucial are there, but Martin didn't bother noting them.
Are you seriously equating the Cult of R'hllor... to Protestantism in the early modern period?
It might end up playing the same role sometime in the future, at least as far as "causing religious wars" goes.
Yeah, we've already gone over how hideously unrealistic their armies are. You have these extremely professional style armies using pike-and-shot formations when there's no shot and the armies are explicitly spelled out as being peasant conscripts, and massive armies with no apparent chain of supply that take unbelievable losses and rebound over and over again (I recall Daenerys losing "half" her troops in a single battle once) to the point that Westeros should probably actually be suffering from a level of depopulation towards the end.
As I have noted, pike-and-shot formations were actually used with longbows and crossbows as well. And peasant conscripts need not necessarily be untrained and unequipped: look at Hungarian
Militia Portalis, which is essentially a peasant levy but formed in such a way to be able to provide part-time professional soldiers. That of course depends on whether same peasants were called up every time, or a different peasant was sent for every callup - but latter does not make much sense, since if you have already equipped and trained a peasant for Militia Portalis duty, why go through same trouble the next year?
But yeah, with the exception of that detail, I don't have any disagreement with what you have written.