Yeah, but my problem is, they didn't have a reason or do anything with those changes. The whole point of the Lannisters is that Joffrey is the ultimate product of Tywin's way of doing things. He is purely the blood of Tywin & his beloved cousin-wife, without the patina of civilized behavior that Egg managed to impose on Tywin. He was raised by Cersei and embodies her attitudes. So we have the question of where, exactly the stuff like Joffrey massacring Robert's bastards comes from? Cersei did that in the books, but show Cersei is kinder and gentler and was troubled by it. They doubled down on his nascent attraction to sexual violence, but where did that come from? Book Tywin has a whole trail of brutalized women in his past, and is theorized to have built the tunnel into the brothel. What did Cersei's black-haired baby fathered by Robert amount to? So little that when they did the flashback to the fortune teller who predicted that Cersei would marry a king and have three children, while the king had nineteen, they kept Cersei's book total of three children, even though she had 4. They made Tywin look smart by having him explain to Jaime the importance of reciprocity in maintaining your image, or chastising his goons for being so wasteful as to torture a blacksmith, but in the books, those were things anyone in their society would and should know, so Tywin's intelligence is at the cost of everyone else. His scenes with Maisie Williams were great, but, again, what was the point? They didn't go anywhere. The writers had to make Tywin be really smart & insightful, so they wrote him taking notice of the oddities about Arya, and the details of her backstory that did not add up, but to what point? Why didn't he act on a girl from the North with a noble's speech and literacy and historical knowledge, that did not jibe with her claimed backstory?

The point of the story, and the point Martin is trying to make in his commentary on fantasy monarchies, is that the Lannisters are the embodiment of what aristocratic societies produce, and how Tywin, Jaime & Cersei are superficially idealized members of their class. Jaime & Cersei are beautiful, he's a great warrior, she's a persuasive & charming queen, their father is a strong and feared leader. And they're all fucked up and incestuous and arrogant and destructive, who do nothing good for anyone else. Jaime's good moments in his backstory and later arc only come when he is separated from his family, when the Mad King made a point of taking him away from House Lannister, and later when they rejected him. And that was the main result of those changes - Jaime's character arc disappeared. They suddenly decided Cersei really did love him, that she would kiss his prosthetic hand, when in the books she hated it and refused to dance with him because he would have to touch her with it. And that's part of the lesson for Jaime - that he has given so much, debased himself so far, for nothing. So every season, there would be something that would make Jaime concerned about Cersei, but every season he would dedicate himself even more to their love. He didn't have an arc, he had a yo-yo. But what's the point of cutting his ties and trying to separate himself from his Lannister heritage, if we aren't clear exactly how awful they actually are? "Humanizing" Cersei & Tywin has the effect of reducing the deterioration of Jaime's relationship with them to just a personal conflict, rather than a synecdoche for his effort to become a better person and leave a better legacy.

It's the same thing that the Odyssey is doing wrong. Changing one of the pieces means it does not fit with the others. Are there gods or not? If not, what is the connection between the deterioration of xenia in their culture, and the arrival of the Sea People? (aSoI&F has ambiguity wrt the gods, but the effects of the besetting violation of xenia are in human reactions, as we start seeing Lannister, Bolton & Frey soldiers murdered after they surrender, rivals switching to rules-lawyering in their approach to guest-right, and having zero compunctions about deceiving the Lannisters or Boltons, and Jaime being unable to make peace with the holdouts, because no one trusts Lannister promises or adherence to the rules of war. At least in the Odyssey that has gods and more magic, word of the Trojan Horse could have spread, and the Laestrygonians and/or Circe could cite that in their failures to be good hosts to the Ithakans, justifying their violence against them by noting that their past conduct makes them untrustworthy guests.

I mean why it worked, and why the Trojans would bring it in. From what I recall of "Troy" it just came across as a dumb whim, and one suspects that if Hector had still been alive, he'd have solved the problem.
OTOH, you're on the money with the logistics of what they showed. I did note, and appreciate, one of the men wiping clean the sword that was stuck in between the boards, which cut his comrade, because I had been wondering what they were going to do about the blood. But anyone who has ever wiped a knife clean knows it doesn't get immaculate on a single wipe, and the guy holding the short blade can't tell that he hit something else, or something else is rubbing firmly against it?

Thanks, I've seen quotes from it, but that's all.