They already did. ^cough^ Renly ^cough^ Stannis ^cough^ Sparrows ^cough^ Tyrells ^cough^ Aegon ^cough^ Sansa ^cough^ Ramsey ^cough^ Euron ^cough^ Meereen ^cough^ Tyrion ^cough^ Tywin ^cough^ Anyway, they've trashed a LOT of major stories, and drastically altered characterizations and that's not even counting minor stuff they jettisoned that looks important ^cough^ Lady Stoneheart ^cough^ Westerlings ^cough^ Citadel crew ^cough^ Quentyn ^cough^.

And does it matter who squeezed out the turd? The issue is, it's gross and it stinks. This is not a cult of George RR Martin. Fidelity to his plan is not a metric of quality nor a guarantee of the same. We keep citing the books, because they are examples of a good story you can tell with these characters. We didn't bring this issue up, Benioff and Weiss did, by leaning so heavily on them at the outset. Benioff and Weiss were too dumb to see that Ned Stark, despite drawing hard moral lines he will not cross for anyone, came within a stroke of bad luck of beating the Lannisters like a drum. They were too dumb to see that Robb Stark was a military prodigy who was undone by a streak of incredible bad luck neither he nor his enemies foresaw or caused to happen. They just saw that Ned & Robb were dead by the halfway point and decided they must be stupid. Then Martin tells them that the rest of the kids Ned raised "win" at the end, so B&W decide they must have ditched that honor and morality their dad and big brother had, so lets show that. And they ignored every single character beat about how nice and kind all four of the surviving Stark characters actually are, how they keep making friends and being nice to people all throughout their stories, and while the mentors they have acquired by the time of Martin's last book are all morally suspect, compromised or even outright evil, the point is going to be that they are NOT like them, they are not succumbing to the same errors and flaws. B&W saw Tywin "won" the War of Five Kings, only to be murdered at the hands of his son, who's an awesome character but not exactly the nicest human being, so they decided Tywin must be a military & political genius. They read somewhere that making good characters means humanizing them, so they make Tywin go through this avuncular bonding with Arya, and never mind that his kids are all fucked up because Tywin is a stone-cold psychotic without a drop of human kindness, and who's triumph has destroyed the kingdom he won, and whose children are tearing apart his legacy. Martin made a big deal in three different chapters about how he was rotting on his own funeral bier! His own children can't be bothered to grieve for him, but people are rallying across the North in memory of Ned Stark to save his daughter or put his son back in his home. And all they took from that, despite making efforts to portray Ned's & Tywin's entire book-lives on screen, was that one lived longer than the other, so he must be a smarter person and better leader. If they can't understand what GRRM was trying to say in the novels where he explicitly spells out the details, replete with symbolism and imagery, how are we supposed to trust that they get it right with only an outline listing the major events?