But from everything I've heard, and judging by the other two, it does seem like it's the best of the three by far, despite some criticism on various points.

I think by this point even the people who screamed the loudest about the inevitable racial and girl-power changes, would be glad to accept those without further comment, if only the rest of it was any good. As we discussed before, I have less of a problem with those but did kind of want them to have some internal logic on who gets played by actors of colour - by now, I've long stopped caring about that.

I'm hesitating now on the comparison between this and Rings of Power. I do think that in some scenes, the WoT writers did better with their off-script original scenes, than the RoP ones - even though the latter had far more freedom and should've had an easier time of it. There were a few moments that deviated significantly from the books, yet worked well. Sadly, there was also a lot of absolute crap and the final episode was particularly atrocious, so as a whole I also consider the first season a failure despite a few promising elements. Based on initial reports on the second season, they plan to change so much that it becomes a very loose adaptation indeed - and somehow I don't have much faith that we'll see more of the good innovations and less of the bad moving forward.

As I mentioned, I haven't seen it - kinda want to, but not enough to pay for it. For that matter, I also haven't seen the last several seasons of GoT and it seems like that's a good decision. But yes, from what I know of the premise, everything does hinge on especially Rhaenyra and Daemon being interesting enough to root for, or against... if they aren't, it's not going to work.