A simple fix to rushing of the last season?

[iprayiam]

There have been plenty of critics and defenders of this last season, but I think just about everyone agrees that the rushed pacing has been among the biggest problems: The long night is over in a flash, then it's teleporting to King's Landing, where Dany turns mad so fast, you get whiplash.

A residual problem is the musical chairs of the "final conflict", turning what should be a culmination of 10 years into a series of "villians of the week". Episode 3, it's the WW. Nevermind, it's Cersi. Nevermind, it's Dany. No one gets proper attention or play out. So here's my suggested fix to avoid all these problems while keeping everything the same:

Dany should have ruthlessly burned (much less of) King's Landing in Season 7 when Cersei refused to help fight the WW's. This would have prevented the need to teleport back to KL halfway through this season. Everyone and the conflict were already there.

Delaying that conflict made zero sense storywise, forced too much plot into season 8 and broke a lot of tension buildup in exchange for cheap surprises.

Doing it in season 7 would have given more time to deal with the White Walkers and Dany time to spiral downward. It would have made the tension of continuing to support her even more real, and not a sudden last minute development. Jon would argue that they need her for defeating the WW, while Sansa and Varys would have an actual reason to hate and distrust her. 

If you still wanted to end everything in front of the IT, you could still have the final play out take place the same way in Episode 6. But we could have spent episode 1, and 2 actually wondering if Dany was descending into paranoia, and freed episodes 3-5 to deal with the White Walkers.

Yes it would have wrapped up the Cersei line earlier, but did her arc really add anything this season that couldn't have been wrapped up more tidily last season ? (Alternatively it could have been pushed to ep 1 this season. )

TL;DR: A lot of pacing, travel time, and plot issues could have been solved by reversing the order of the Cersei confrontation and the WW's while leaving the endgame in tact.