Just Finished Reading Lev Grossman's Magicians Trilogy (for 3rd Time)

I remember, a few years ago while browsing in my Gainesville Borders bookstore (which has sadly gone out of business) and looking for an interesting book to buy, coming across a display of The Magicians, a fantasy novel by fiction critic Lev Grossman...to be the first in a series. It turned out to be a great book, a fantasy story that managed to span both an imaginary world and our own "real" world while paying tribute to great authors of the genre...most notably C.S. Lewis and J.K. Rowling.  Each time a new book came out...it eventually broke that Grossman would be producing a trilogy...I eagerly read it.  And then a period of time passed, and I reread the series.  What prompted me to just recently pick it up a third time and read it was the Syfy Channel's adaptation of The Magicians to a TV series.  When I saw how much it was diverging from the author's original story, I gave up watching it...and instead began reading the books a third time...

When it comes to the genre of fantasy literature, the norm seems to be for the author to expand the story line into a series of books.  Sometimes the effort results in a compact, limited series with a small number of main characters and the subplots kept to a disciplined minimum.  I prefer these series and their authors, the most notable being the aforementioned Magicians by Lev Grossman, The Dagger and the Coin by Daniel Abraham, and Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson.  Unfortunately, some other fantasy writers, upon seeing the "cash cow" inherent in prolonging their series, went down a different path and dramatically expanded the scope of their stories while introducing many new characters and subplots...making keeping up with the increasingly complex and confusing story more and more difficult.  The classic example has been Robert Jordan with his Wheel of Time series...he was so bogged down with trying to finish this eventual 14-volume saga that he died while writing the final book, which had ballooned to 2000 pages.  Brandon Sanderson then stepped in and, while incorporating Jordan's ideas for the ending, smartly wrote the last volumes and presented a complete work that managed to tie up many loose threads and produce a satisfactory conclusion.  In our time, we have another fantasy writer with pretty much the same problem that Jordan had: George R.R. Martin with his A Song of Fire and Ice series...more commonly known by its first book, A Game of Thrones.  Martin has already taken many years to produce his first five volumes, but in recent times has been further distracted by the HBO TV adaptation and has continually been delaying the publication of the sixth book.  Instead, the TV show (which incidentally also greatly diverges from the written story) has actually surpassed the book series' timeline and has introduced plot changes that would have been revealed in the sixth book...had Martin ever gotten around to writing it.  In this series, as was the case with Robert Jordan's, there are way too many new characters continually being added along with new sub-stories.  I have just about given up on George R.R. Martin: he can take his oh-so important series and stuff it...