There's a lot to all of this. The comparison with GoT is on point. Everybody wants to have the next GoT. But HBO didn't say "we're going to try this adaptation, and renew it year to year to see if it has legs." They said, "we're going to adapt the GoT book series, it should take about seven years, and we're going to make it GOOD." (Things got wonky when Martin didn't finish the series and the show had to write original material that was obviously inferior in quality.)
Amazon took the modern streaming service approach and said, "we'll see if the fans give it legs and if not we'll cancel it." Notice that making it good and doing the whole thing is not part of the project. Rafe Judkins was never going to make Robert Jordan's series, he was clear about that, and every announcement going up to the series premier made it obvious this was not Robert Jordan's WoT. Book fans gave it a chance anyway.
When it turned out that Rafe Judkins and his team can't write worth a damn, the goose was cooked. How many people watched season 1 and never came back? How many give season 2 a chance and gave up then? We don't know, but the question of people invested in the series is legit, and likely to be bad. So here we are, as the saying goes.
I'm not going to celebrate like ElderHamann says some people do, but this outcome was settled before a single episode aired. Rafe Judkins was given license to do his own thing, and he did. Remember, he had NO resumé to speak of when he was given this job. David Benioff had a very credible resumé when HBO hired him to run GoT. What Sony/Amazon were thinking, I have no idea.
