Yeahhhh
You know when he actually said last year "If I don't have Winds done by the time I go to this NZ con you can lock me away for good", I actually had a little hope that he was getting close to done and was focused on the book and would finish it by mid-2020.
But now? After all this writing in his cabin and he still says he has a ways to go and is talking about next year, lol
What I don't get is if he's being honest (and tbf as much as people give him shit I don't see any reason he would lie in his updates, be too optimistic, sure, but not lie), and he's knocking out a chapter every 3-4 days or so. I mean even if this book is two thousand pages long (which it won't be), there's not that many chapters in one of these books and at a rate of a chapter every 3-4 days, he should be done with the first draft in a couple months if he was at least like halfway.
So either he keeps deleting and re-writing chapters after finishing them or he gets out a chapter or two and then takes long week or two breaks between them.
I've been in the boat for the last 5-8 years that Winds will come out and Spring will not, but Winds will move the pieces to a close enough endpoint there will still be some closure for a lot of characters and a clear direction of where it would have likely ended up. So I really do hope Winds does finish and come out. But yeah, I've stopped caring since it's pretty obvious GRRM sucks at writing this book. There's no way, no matter how busy you are, that you can't finish one book in a series you are invested writing over a ten year period.
Hell I have to imagine a huge problem with the book is how the fuck do you write a novel over 10 years? 10 years is such a long time, but year 9 you are a different person than you were when you wrote the chapters in year 1. I can see why he might be tossing and re-writing chapters if they are from 5 years back and now they don't match up with the style of his current writing. I bet he just tossed it all and started over at some point and tried to knock it out like a normal book.