A little more on Martin. It's easy to forget after a while, but it's obvious that he put in a ton of effort at establishing a specific historical milieu. All those little details, I imagine, took countless hours of careful research.
Second, I think he's just a better writer than most people who write in SF/F. He's not as lyrical as, say, Mark Helprin in Winter's Tale, but he's also much better Robert Jordan or even David Gemmell from sentence to sentence. Small example: I picked up Wheel of Time Book 8 (just to temporarily escape some reading for class) and right there in chapter 1 Jordan describes a character as walking around "unconcernedly." It's a small thing, but really noticeable after coming from Martin, who doesn't share Jordan's lazy over-reliance on adjectives and adverbs.
Some speculation: Pretty sure Sandor Clegane is dead. Some other mercenaries may steal his dog-helm and call themselves the Hound, but it seems pretty definitive in Book 4. And, to his credit, Martin's dead characters tend to stay dead (with one or two notable exceptions). I'm not convinced that Daenarys is going to be the unifying force once she gets to the main continent (if she ever does) ... I thought the army of the Unsullied was the most ridiculous fantasy thing I've read in a while, and I can only assume that Martin was mocking Plato's Republic (or maybe other fantasy writers). Honestly, they carry cute puppies around that they later have to kill to enter into the brotherhood of warriors? Way over the top. After the Dothraki, the Daenarys sections have been pretty weak, because the locales, like Dorne, just don't resonate very well.
One thing I really liked about Book 4 was how the absence of Tywin Lannister felt very palpable. The guy was such a dick, but in many ways he was the one holding the kingdom, such as it is, together, doing the dickish things that needed to be done to keep his family in power. While there's an immediate sense of relief in Book 4 that this malevolent force is gone, the vaccuum that he leaves (and the inability of his two children to fill it properly) gives way to an uncertainty and dread that's all over Book 4.
You're right about the skpping ahead--there's so many really young characters (like, under 10 years old) that need to come into their own to bring this story to a good end: Bran, Arya, maybe the youngest Lannisters Myrcella and Tommen (if he can survive his mother's regency), the King-Beyond-the-Wall's infant son, and Robert's various bastard children (there's like 20 of these, right? But only 2 seem important).
