It's one thing to take the liberty of diverging from the source material in ways that serve the visual medium. It's another to tell different stories than the ones told in the source material and deliver widely different interpretations of our characters.
The only faithful part to the books at this point is that ciri & geralt are in Kaer Morhen and ciri is training, that's it. Kaer Morhen itself was stripped of its secluded aura. Instead, its a place where witchers bring girls to from town for entertainment purposes. Vesemir's reaction to that alone is so out of character that it's enough for me to claim these writers either think they can write better characters than those of the novels or seriously have problems interpreting them. As for the Eskel controversy, well that's quite simply wasn't Eskel. The writers took the liberty of creating a new character and giving him Eskel's name. Or at least that's what I told myself while watching. It makes it less bothersome.
In the meantime, there's another storyline going on that was extremely confusing, reductive to the political intrigue of the continent and has nothing to do with anything that ever happened in the books. And again it's not just the plot. I can live with plot changes. It's the characters interpretations I have issues with. Fringilla, Cahir & Francesca are very widely different from their source material characters that I already have troubles seeing how can they take these characters to where the novels took them by the end.
Needless to say, I'm disappointed. The show did improve in most its technical aspects. You can also tell how much effort the actors are putting into this. But the negatives surrounding the writing are outweighing it all, at least for me as a book reader. I'm sure most non book readers people will enjoy watching this because the quality of the production & the fun factor are undoubtedly there. But as a fan of the books, this has already gone so deep into the wrong direction for me I don't know if it can be fixed anymore. And it's disappointing.