Perhaps. But I think the deeper answer is that George has learned to be inordinately careful not to comment too much on what he intended in a passage, or an event, or character when the answer is at all equivocal.
What George has learned, especially since 2000, is that his fans will chatter endlessly about what they read, what it meant and where it is all going. And they enjoy doing so. A lot. And that enjoyment tends to fill in the intervening years between publication and has GREATLY added to the word of mouth success of the series. Without that word of mouth success? Game of Thrones on HBO would never have happened. All four of the novels don’t make it to the top #10 bestseller list at the same time. ADwD does not open at #1 on the hardcover fiction list.
George gets that; he absolutely gets it.
I would argue that in recognition of this careful deconstruction and debate by fans, the books have become deliberately equivocal and the easter eggs and misdirection within the POVs have become more numerous and more subtle as the series has gone on. Indeed, the Easter eggs and the subtlety has greatly increased in AFFC and ADwD.
George never fully understood when he wrote AGoT how popular the series would become – or how debated this series would become on the internet. How could he have known?
I put it to you that had GRRM known how carefully his novels would be parsed, there is NO WAY that the clues to R+L=J would have been so obviously underscored in the text of the original novel. It would have been more subtle. But back then, George didn’t know how well the book would be received, nor did he have any idea how the internet would effect its popularity, so he erred a bit on the cautious side and made some of his mysteries a little more obvious than he might have cared to, in hindsight.
One of the utterly remarkable things concerning the series is how everyone reads it and yet so many have profoundly different takes. People have violent intellectual disagreements on what they read and what it all meant in terms of story structure and what it revealed about the backstory, character motives and where the story is headed. Yes, much of this is ASoIaF geeks being geeks in a Geeky way. But the phenomenon owes much to the deliberately equivocal nature and unreliability of the POV structure, too.
The POV structure and its many red-haired stepchildren has paid off in GOLD for GRRM. He knows enough not to come down with a pronouncement from on high. Let the fans speculate and chatter. They like it and it aids in both the fans’ enjoyment of the series and the spread of positive word of mouth.
Don’t kill one of those geese laying the golden eggs, as it were.
