There's no world where anyone adapts the book series closely with live action. The series is simply too long, particularly for the level of CGI, etc., we expect out of this sort of "premiere" television. I think overall they've done a good job given how difficult the task is, though there's certainly some changes that I think were mistakes, and other things that while I might not outright believe are mistakes, are different from how I would have done it.

I will say I agree that the last episode of S1 is my least favorite, but, they had a lot stacked against them and had to rewrite the final two due to Mat's actor not coming back after covid forced a filming break. That set off a chain reaction with a lot of far reaching consequences.

I liked S2 more than S1. Quality went up on basically every metric for me, though the finale still wasn't as epic as I would have hoped for... but is probably about all you can hope for without a LOTR-like budget. If they somehow make it to Dumai's Wells, hopefully they have more money then.