
When I first created the original version of this reading order, I was in the middle of a re-read of the series and had just finished A Storm of Swords. At a certain point along the way I got to thinking about how to approach A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons. Now that both books have been published, there are options available to us that never were before.
George R.R. Martin famously took years to finish Feast after Storm came out, and infamously took even more years to finish Dance after Feast came out. As we know, this came down to several problems. First, he’d intended to have a five-year jump in the narrative following the conclusion of Storm, but after about a year of writing he realized it wasn’t working and had to start over. Then, once he’d started over, he discovered that while the five-year jump didn’t work for most of the storylines, it worked really well for a few, and it was hard to get them right without it. Then he realized that he had way too many characters and way too much story to fit in one volume as planned, and he needed to decide how to split one volume into two – should he tell half the story for all the characters, or (nearly) all the story for half the characters? (He chose the latter solution.) Finally, he struggled with something called “The Meereenese Knot.” To discuss this I’d have to get a little bit spoilery, but it boiled down to how to get a whole bunch of characters to the place where a certain other character was, and in what order, and whether to have all of them get there by the end of Dance, and what to do with the character toward whom they’re traveling while they’re on their way. 
As you’d quickly discover were you to read Feast as written, fans who read Storm when it came out had to wait a decade to find out how the stories of many of their favorite characters continued, since Martin decided to save those characters’ storylines for Dance — despite the fact that in story time, many of those storylines pick up almost immediately after we left them. Even someone like me, who was late to the party and first read the series about a year, year and a half before Dance ended up coming out, had a delay. In my case it was a delay long enough to read the entire series, then read it over again, then have a month or two to wait before Dance came out. Between the real-world delay and the weird sensation of following half the characters’ stories for a while in Feast before looping back in time to catch up with the other characters in Dance, reading that latter book can feel a little wonky for some readers. 
Here’s where it changes.
Right now, for the first time, the only real-world delay necessary to endure between reading, say, Jon’s last chapter in Storm and his first in Dance is the amount of time it takes you to read the entirety of Feast and get to the beginning of Dance after you’ve finished Storm, since Martin split the characters up between the two books.