As I understand the deal with crossbows and regular bows effectiveness against armor and in general was pretty similar. Best longbow could hit as hard as a crossbow and best crossbow could shot as far as a longbow. The great thing about crossbows was that you could hand one to some common soldier type and teach him how to us it pretty quickly. So long as he was strong enough to work the cocking mechanism (which ranged from bracing the weapon on the ground and standing up to fancy windlasses) but he was because he'd been doing a lot of manual labor all his life. Whereas a longbow basically took a lifetime of training to get expert at it and build the right kind of strength in the right parts of your body. But when you got a bunch of experts and massed them, it was murderous because of how much faster they could shoot than crossbowmen.

Dunno if George thought about this, but Bolton guys toting crossbows seems perfect. Roose seems very much the type who'd spend some coin to make a more complicated weapon that took iron and for the fancier ones some engineering know how. He could keep them locked up in the Dreadfort and only train more than a few guys to use them if it looked like war. Roose would be the type to think about how missile weapons could be an equalizer for his people if they might decide to rise up, so he wouldn't want a bunch of villagers practicing with six-foot yew bows.

Podcast panel, I've been listening to The Churn a bunch lately, the Expanse podcast. Maybe reach out to those SyFy people? They seem like they might be a middle-sized fish as far as popularity, though they aren't Sarah Koenig.