Definitely agree with this sentiment. I read AFFC when it came out, 5 years after I read the rest of the series, and this year I reread all of them to get caught up for this one. Reading book 4 right after the first 3 really drove home to me how much worse it was. And book 5 had its problems as well, with some of the clunky writing and fillerish material, but it made me forget about that on the strength of its characters, namely Jon, Tyrion, Dany, Davos, Bran, Theon... all of those chapters were strong, and that's the bulk of the book. Compare that to AFFC and you've got Arya, Sansa of the original characters... Jaime's pretty good, but I liked him much better in book 3, in book 4 he just felt like he was spinning wheels... then you've got cartoon villain Cersei, pointless sidequest Brienne with sooo many chapters, the Dorne chapters that weren't worthwhile except the last page of the last one, the Iron Islands stuff that wasn't interesting except for a bit of Victarion... yeah. I can only hope that things come back together in the rest of the books because they're feeling pretty unravelled.