Finished the second season, and while I've felt the lighting was much improved this time around, I feel there were huge issues with the pacing. With only 8 episodes, it felt like it had barely gotten started by the time it ended. I could understand the pacing if this were the main GoT series with more episodes and longer seasons overall, but it really feels glacial at times, and at other times it feels like it's double-timing and skipping over stuff. And it doesn't help that I didn't have access to the 4th episode which was somehow missing from the list of episodes.
It seemed pretty obvious to me that the writers' strike had somewhat undermined Season 2. It felt partially finished.