I gave up after (1) the end of the Capaldi run, which itself was a massive disappointment that had a few terrific episodes in it, and (2) when we moved, switched cable providers, and the new one didn't have BBC America in the package we wanted. And in the meantime, Jodie's season only JUST came to a streaming platform we have.
I expect I'll get around to it, but to me, there a central flaw of the Moffat era.
Moffat struck me as, much like JJ Abrams, being actually a really craptastic storyteller without anyone around to reign him in and/or focus his efforts. He's another "roller-coaster engineer." His approach to storytelling was break-neck speed and selling things as "big" and "important" but without actually doing more to lay the groundwork within the story for that. As a result, I can barely recall anything from the Matt Smith seasons. I can only dimly remember the middle Clara season because it actually had a through-line...which he then totally discarded the next season as if it didn't matter.
The other major problem, as noted, was the multi-year delays in seasons. It's hard to maintain enthusiasm for the show when it only arrives every other year or so, and then when the seasons themselves are just...bleh.
And the stories in the individual episodes themselves stopped being that interesting. Like, the concepts weren't that interesting. The most memorable and best episodes were, of course. But a lot were just....awful. Like the one where trees take over the world and then, like, they burn up and go away and nobody remembers or something. Or the one where the moon is a friggin' egg laid by a space dragon, which hatches, and then a new moon is there and again, nobody seems to remember or notice after it all. That s**t isn't interesting. It's just stupid. It's like the writers were drunk and daring each other to write an episode about the most bats**t ideas they could, but then it was production time and that was all they had.
