|
As for your point about not having a middle, that is actually correct. Martin's original plan was to jump five years from A STORM OF SWORDS to A DANCE WITH DRAGONS, which didn't work due to being implausible. So A FEAST FOR CROWS was introduced to fill in some of the events that would have happened in that timeframe (whilst reducing it to a few months rather than five years). The book was never meant to exist and was written on the fly, hence it's notable problems.
That's a portion of the problem, but the lack of a coherent "middle" to the story more stems from the fact that Martin doesn't really have much of a specific plan which he follows when writing. ("My process as a writer is not one of thoroughly outlining ahead of time, which can result in my muse leading me down blind alleys and dead ends.") When writing a single, self-contained work that isn't an issue, but when writing a lengthy series, it can lead to serious problems.
There was nothing intrinsically implausible about a five year jump following a Storm of Swords. Westeros as a whole had been so war ravaged, most of the major players pulling back to lick their wounds and regroup would've worked just fine and anything that had occurred during that time could've been gradually revealed.
However, we should get back on-track (assuming Martin has pulled it off) with the story he had planned in the next book.
The next novel we're going to get will bear no resemblance to the theoretical novel that Martin would've set five years following Storm of Swords as, despite their length, the last two novels have barely moved the time line forward at all. Especially when it comes to characters like the Starks who are children or young adults, five years makes a huge amount of difference in terms of the sorts of stories you can tell about them. Now, by the time things are finally done, Martin may have managed to string together a fully coherent story, but the story that we'll actually have will have only the most limited resemblance to the story that existed in Martin's mind as A Game of Thrones was initially written and published which creates a degree of incongruity between it's beginning, middle, and end.
This isn't just a problem with ASoFaI or Martin in particular. As sprawling series became increasingly common over the past couple of decades the most successful ones have all suffered like this as the authors renown gradually causes their editors become less able to say "no" or set limits and their publishers become less willing to.
Out of all the POV charaters introduced in the series so far (excepting the prologue ones, who die by tradition), a grand total of two are dead, and one of them came back (sort of).
A character doesn't have to be a POV character for a reader to find them interesting. There have been quite a number of non-POV characters that were given extensive "screen time" and then killed off. Not a flaw in and of itself, but I can certainly see how someone could find it grating if those happened to be amoung the characters they found engaging.