I’m not judging someone who read the entire series or those who did it multiple times. People are free to enjoy what they want. Regardless of that, doing 8 months multiplied by even 2-3 times is a considerable chunk of a human lifespan. It explains takes like “I don’t like the adaptation because it made too many changes” and it needs to be put into perspective. I’ve elaborated more on this in my other comment.

“This series is 1:1 replica of a book” and “this series is only taking a passing inspiration from original books” are merely facts and a starting point to set expectations before moving on to describe and judge an adaptation. It’s okay to judge by comparing original to adaptation but “this is not a faithful adaptation, therefore it is bad” does not help in evaluating quality of derived work.

You’ve read 14 book series multiple times? That’s enormous investment that’s probably setting unrealistic expectations.

I’ve only started the first one to die out of boredom quickly so I can’t imagine repeatedly getting through a slog first few books supposedly are. My girlfriend read everything after the first season and once she was finished she did a re-watch which she enjoyed, in part because it’s different. Second season has higher production value but seems to be confusing with the amount of changes so far. I’m following along because the themes are interesting and there’s nothing so bad that would discourage me.

Even without reading everything it’s fair to assume that this couldn’t be a faithful adaptation. They’ll likely have to merge more story lines, characters, then remove some things entirely and it’ll still be a challenge to fit this into amount of seasons that’s reasonable to produce. The Expanse did plenty of that but it still had roughly a season per book, and that was with a book series that Bezos personally enjoys.