Lol, how is Dany the villain? The season 6 finale wasn't a big climax (except that the status quo got pretty much changed for everyone in 60 minutes)? "Wish-fulfilment"? Pff, Whose wish? Have you guys even watched the show? The entire point is that none of these guys (nor the show) think they are one-dimensional or villains but that they act on incentives and react to internal and external pressures in their lives but they nevertheless need to come together or else they and everyone else dies because personifications of Death come for them. Since they all have their own motives and incentives to do or not do exactly this, that makes it that much more difficult for humanity to survive. The point is to see who is selfless enough to get that point on the show and who doesn't get it and why and that in itself is pretty interesting.
I would agree that there is a lot of other great tv shows out there but those are not of great interest to me personally because they are set in genres that I do not find interesting (Breaking Bad, Fargo, True Detective are mostly crime-dramas set in present-day and that in itself does not grab me either, does not mean I consider them bad just because they don't play to my interests) or they are overpraised for essentially playing to people's nostalgia (see my thoughts on Stranger Things for instance). Then there is much weirder fare (Hannibal, Twin Peaks) that is not everyone's cup of tea. But do you notice all the numerous live-action dark- or high-fantasy shows of epic scale that we have now, all featuring memorable and morally complex characters who we can (dis)agree with and even despise or love on different occasions, depending the context? Aren't all these many fantasy shows really choking life out of this boring, repetitive show? Aren't there just so many? Yeah, didn't think so either. I cannot think of another medieval fantasy show that is of the same quality level. A lot of 'prestige tv' are dramas that are set in modern/future times because budget and do not feature a cast this big, or have this many storylines spread out over multiple continents (once again, these other shows may have budget constraints so they don't go for that, which is fine).
None of the shows I mentioned attempted to tell a big, epic fantasy story in a way that would subvert expectations and some genre conventions and assumptions along the way, only to reassert certain moral virtues towards the end that the audience thought were foolish (honour, kindness, justice are all appreciated by the audience when we see examples of them on the show, precisely because they happen so rarely without some kind of bad consequences but then you have the crowd who does not believe that there can be goodness or victories that do not entail some type of misfortune attached to them).
The show does not need to reinvent itself constantly because first of all, it adapted a story for arguably 5 seasons (there is your first constraint because readers were howling early on over any deviation from the source material so imagine if the show started changing its very nature) and has only recently begun to diverge in significant ways from the source material (and even that we cannot be really sure of, since we haven't gotten the last 2 books yet). Like it or not, this is an adaptation and is hence limited at least to some degree in what it can and cannot do (I think alien spaceships showing up in King's Landing in season 8 would probably be a reinvention but also monumentally stupid). So either that means you got bored with the story because a) it took so long to finish the tv show (which is much faster-paced compared to the books already), in which case I would not blame you since investing time in a story worth 7 loooong books is really demanding, or b) you just got bored with the world that was created, or c) you are asking the show to do something or be something that it never set out to be. That is like me telling Breaking Bad after 4 seasons 'you know, seeing this guy do the same shtick for 4 years has become really repetitive: do something else now, Breaking Bad, stop being so boring and repetitive'.
Game of Thrones was never 'Trope Subversion: The Show' and if 'reinventing itself' means that it has to break every single fantasy genre convention that exists just for the sake of it and not because the story demands it, I am glad that it did not do as you all suggested (hey, you know what would subvert conventions? If a bastard like Ramsay Snow turned out to be the saviour of the world, wouldn't that be awesome? Heck no, that'd be awful). That would have been painfully obvious and would have undercut a lot of the big thematic heft the show is going for. And being needlessly bleak and hopless is not the ending that Martin had in mind for his story anyway: bittersweet is the word here and if the occasional victory of some of our protagonists (Arya, Sansa, Cersei, Tyrion) getting what they want or surviving some battle (Jon, Davos) is too optimistic for you, I don't know what show you were watching because this was never 'Nihilism: The Show' either. It acquired that reputation because people were focusing on the presentation of the violence instead of thinking about its meaning. In fact, if the show got more optimistic about humanity's chances that might be a reinvention to many who were watching it and think of it as a nihilistic show.
So yeah, if you think this show is about who between Cersei, Dany and Jon gets to park their butt on the Iron Throne, I'm afraid you missed the point. The show's nature is what it is and it does what it does well enough in my opinion.
