I came to a similar realization but unfortunately not until 5 or so books into the Wheel of Time series. I think I found myself reading a 10+ page section in which several women were doing their hair and gossiping about the men in their lives and realized (based on that scene plus some other trends I started seeing in previous books) that the series had jumped the shark and the author was now just trying to pump up the page count and make the series run as long as possible, to milk it. Thankfully I got out well before he blew past what was originally intended to be the "final" book in the series, which of course was not.

I read the first one or two Game of Thrones books, thought they were awesome, and much much higher quality level than what Wheel of Tome became, but, alas, by then I had too much fantasy/medieval/magic fatigue and put them down. I will likely pick them up again.