I disagree almost entirely.

Like anything, there are trade offs. The more expansive a piece of work, the less detailed it will be, assuming there are some sort of financial or time constraints. Expansive is not the negative opposite of detailed. Character development should be at a certain level for how expansive a narrative is, and I think GoT is well above that mark relative to its expansiveness. The Wire was less expansive, and BrBa quite a bit less... now that I think of it, BrBa has a fairly small scope for the sort of show it is. Yet that is not a drawback, because the character development is intensely nuanced.