I'm still entirely of the opinion that he was a fair ways through Winds of Winter, dragging along as has become the norm for him, but after the backlash from the HBO series ending, based heavily on the notes and plans he was contractually obligated to give to HBO in the event of his passing before the series ended, he has changed direction significantly and rethought much of his end game and the necessary leadup to it.

At this point, coming up on 4 years since the HBO series ended, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't scrap a large majority of the story he supposedly already wrote and started off almost from scratch. The idea that after a decade of false-promises and he's only finished 3/4 of the book sounds like more BS from him. I would say he doesn't owe readers anything, but the amount of BS he's been feeding people for over a decade about how far along he is, when he thinks it'll be complete, and how much he claims to be working on it need to stop.

I honestly do base a number of my purchases on the cost of the book to page count, but its quite a bit more nuanced than that. If it's a brand new release from an author whose previous work I've enjoyed, I'm likely to pick it up, but if the price is $26USD on release, and that book isn't at least 350 pages, I'm definitely not buying it on release and going to wait a good little while until it hits the $15 or less price point.

If the book is under 200 pages, I'm almost never going to pay over $15 for it unless it's an author I really, really enjoy, or a topic that is especially interesting to me. I get that page count is in no way a metric for quality or likeability, but it's generally a reasonable metric for value. I'm also inclined to believe if a book is well liked &/or popular, it'll be fairly easy to borrow or find a used copy at a reasonable price, so even then, it's more a question of personal patience more than value.