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I won't say it is incompetency, but rather the modern problem that most shows don't have the same writers writing all the episodes from start to finish. Due to production time constraints most modern TV shows employ the "group attack" production theory... meaning if they have ten episodes to make, they put several groups of people on two episodes each, so now they have all ten episodes in production simultaneously. They do that because the actual writing and development of a property typically takes four times as long as the actual shooting and editing of the property.

They also do the same thing with the directors. By splitting the directing duty up as well, it also increases the speed of production as it allows more people to focus on fewer details. So all the labor intensive activities of creating are cut in half, which gives you a bit more leeway in principal shooting and effects editing. By splitting the writing and directing up, it now takes two to three months to write and a similar amount of time to shoot and edit. Viola, you now have the same show made in nearly half the time.

The problem is now you have more cooks in the kitchen at two critical stages of production, and without drastic oversight by the executive producers it becomes very easy for multiple writers and directors to "wander". This means you have some writers introducing elements that they care about while other writers abandon them. All that matters is the main core story, so a lot of side stuff if they can't open and close it in the episode they are working on, will get left on the floor if another writer is not invested in it.

Then you get complications. "Complications" can be anything from actor availability to location availability. Everyone loved Tobias, but perhaps the actor wasn't available to come back and shoot more scenes. Perhaps he had "issues" during production (actor clashed with production staff, other actors, took too long to get his takes, didn't take direction well, etc.) or even just didn't want to keep working on the show. A lot of stuff can happen during production that causes talent to be dismissed that we may never hear about. And sometimes this causes a scramble to rewrite and write out that character. One big thing that happens on shows is a female cast member will become pregnant and the writers and production staff will have to completely retool their involvement in the show to reduce the strain on them and shoot them in such a way that their pregnancy is not obvious to the viewer (unless it is written into the show itself, which most shows do just to avoid the hassle).

I guess what I'm saying in my usual long-winded and meandering way, is that the writers are only one aspect of the show at which a "failure point" could happen. It could be "bad writing"... it could be "bad directing"... it could be "bad acting"... and it could be "bad editing". At any point along the production schedule you can break the show. You can take something good and turn it bad due to a failure at various points on the chain. It really takes a team effort to turn a good show out and in many cases it is "the stars aligning" for a show to turn into something really special and escape the typical "good but not great" trap. Kind of like a great band of musicians you need a creative team that feeds off each other, understands each other and are more or less on the same page when it comes to the story they are going to tell.

I imagine there is a lot of "well I don't like this idea so out it goes" on Fear. Between the various writers and directors, and perhaps even the actors. One writer wants to focus on Nick, another writer wants to focus on Milfy, one director wants to focus on Travis, the actress playing Ophelia is getting pissed that she is never written into any good stories... all of this winds up affecting the flow of the show and we get what we get. Then the final product has the extra weight of fan preconceptions. Everyone THINKS they know what they want to see until they see it, then they don't like it and want something else.

Long diatribe short: it is easy to blame the knights for not slaying the dragon, but it is hard for us to really know where the fault lies.

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Ezekial