Even though I didn't believe Eugene's story for a second, I was still thrilled with that plotline. They'd get to DC, find out he was lying, the group would encounter something new and priorities would be adjusted. Something would shake up the characters one way or another. Similar ideas were hinted at earlier: at the CDC and the guy at the bar talking about Omaha. Chasing something like that would have given the show some direction.
But geographic direction isn't the only form of direction that can make a show good. If the group's 'journey' had simply been an evolving philosophy for how they wanna be in the new world, that could have accomplished it just fine. The show started down this path a couple times. One was when Dale was holding the 'town hall' style meeting deciding how they wanted to handle the prisoner kid at the farm (a high point in the series for me). Another was when Rick went sorta crazy after Lori died. But they didn't continue any line of thinking enough to give any cohesion to the series.
It's this lack of cohesion that is making me tired. Examples:
*When Andrea and the Governor died, the Woodbury plotline is over. The main group goes back to being the same characters they were before
*The best character development in the series so far has been what Daryl's character underwent from the start until Merle reappeared. Then the Merle thing got resolved, and Daryl has reverted to the same person he was in the beginning of S3. Ultimately, no continuation of his development. Just isolated pockets of good story.
*As soon as the Terminus survivors die, the series proceeds as though Terminus never happened. The lasting effect is that Carol is back in Rick's good graces, which is simply a return to where we were when S3 began.
An example of what I mean could be done to accomplish the direction I mean: Rick/Carl could be having periodic conversations about the different groups they had encountered, considering all the different viewpoints and combining them to create a overriding idea of how their group was going to handle challenges going forward. Different survivors have shown a variety of ways to approach living in the new world (Woodbury, Terminus, Carol's choice to kill, the Governor's new group etc). The main group could pull lessons from each experience, debating the strengths and weaknesses of each and Carl could be the lens through which we see their philosophy being updated each time.