smokeythebear said:
It's almost like the Rhaegal CGI team budget suddenly hit overdraft and the producers just pulled the plug.
I could definitely see this happening, or something close. The OCC podcast guys were talking about how the season felt like it has been reverse engineered. Basically, they took their time constraints, budget constraints and their ending and then put the story around it, instead of just telling a good story.
Although I do think they wanted to get rid of the dragon to further the idea that Dany is being backed into a corner as well. Maybe this was a way accomplish both.
The unrealistic nature of the attack was just to provide a shocking "Wow" moment - but it was done at such an expense to reality that it backfired.
I really like Pete's idea above of how to do the scene and have it be more realistic. It's like they threw that easy way to tell the story out the window just so it would provide a couple seconds of surprise...