I don’t know if they want the story to be different; what they want is the tone to be different. WoT trying to ride the GoT coattails was a bad idea from the start and has turned off most of the book readers. I don’t know if they care about the story enough to want it to be different as long as they are tapping in to the grim dark tone.

To address the original question, rights holders can give the rights to their properties to whomever they want, and derivative rights are all separate from each other - so a right holder can give film rights to one party and stage production rights to another, for example. The key is what the contract between the rights holder and the derivative author details. My guess is that Amazon bought the exclusive rights to any film adaptations, and that would bar another party from doing the same. That’s a very general overview but considering that this Amazon, I’m sure that a) a team a lawyers pored over the agreements and b) plenty of money was spent to make sure that all rights were exclusive and as broad as possible. There has been talk about some other project dealing with other Ages and that’s possible because it is outside the rights granted to Amazon but if you’re looking for a third party to step in to my would either be buying the rights from Amazon or it would be far in the future where Amazon’s rights terminated.

If you check enough boxes then the quality of the product doesn’t matter. The subjective value of art is secondary to the objective value of making sure you’ve got more checked boxes than the next guy.

Prime’s UI is one of the worst I have ever seen.

Some people can’t taste the subtleties between different glasses of wine and are happy with a mediocre house red. Some people don’t know the difference between a prime cut of beef and chuck and are happy with whatever steak they are served. Some people can’t differentiate the tone of a show with its basic plot map and are happy with whatever they’re served as long as point A and point B are the same. Others are more sensitive to subtle and non-tangible change and recognize how it alters the end product.

There’s also the old adage that sex sells. I fell like what we see far more often is a show luring an audience in with sex and nudity and then toning it down later in the series. Sometimes this might be because of renewed contracts with renewed language but I also think that some studios (HBO more than others) really try to use sex and nudity as a hook.

They changed the entire tone of the show and completely changed most of the characters just to try and make it “darker” and “more edgy.” Robbing the EF5 of their early innocence was unforgivable character assassination; what they did to Thom was laughable. There are many issues with the show and the shift in tone right out of the gates was a slap in the face to fans.