I pretty much agree with your assessment.

Even at 13 episodes it would work well with the first two books, which are relatively simple (one or two story lines, both fairly linear and easy to adapt) and which can be summarized without losing much (but foreshadowing moments etc., which is hardly essential in TV writing and even to be avoided most of the time).

By the end of the first season, all the real problems adapting WOT would start.

One of the major problem is that WOT would require the cast of a very large soap opera, most of them with very unevenly spread screen appearances (as happens with side players in soaps - most of a soap's budget goes to casting) - but with the requirements in VFX, location, extras etc. of a big budget production.

The combination of the two is really not good (and why we never, ever see anything remotely like this on regular TV series).

Some key characters appear in a handful of key scenes spread over many seasons. Just to secure the return of your Moiraine actress would cost a lot of money, or you just go and take the risk to have to recast her. And she's but one "star".... the problem in WOT is that there are dozens of secondary and tertiary characters that would need to be "secured" that way: Sheriam, Alviarin, Verin, Siuan, Morgase, Domon, most Forsaken, Min, Fain, Tam, Bran & Marin, Loial (this list would be fairly long, before getting to the more generic characters that you could replace by an extra playing "generic Sheriam's circle cronie" replacing a character like Brendas, or Carlinya without any problem) all vanish from the story for long stretches, very long stretches.... if they have to get recast often, that's nightmarish for the audience.

This show past the second season (books 3-4) would become a logistical nightmare to film and cost a fortune in casting alone, as there are also many indirect costs attached to handling a too large cast, like having to add additional days of shooting to accomodate conflicts in the schedules of some of the actors who must have scenes together.

That's not a problem with a limited regular cast, and not much within a single season in big shows.. but on a show like WOT it would be a huge problem.

A lot of TV shows have a few recurring guest stars (eg: Lost,), but there's a major difference: the writers of a show like Lost write the episodes according to the availability of these guest stars. If they are not available, they have to work around this (as all fans of Alias well remember re: Lena Olin....). This is very difficult in an adaptation. You can't just "write off" minor player key scenes, nor can always move them around to another episode because your Sheriam just happens to have a stage play in London and can't fly to LA to film your five scenes, for which obviously she isn't paid that much and will never agree to refuse other works to accommodate you, when you need her to)

As for replacing these more minor recurring players with generic characters to avoid that, that just wouldn't work. It's the little things like the recurrence of colourful side players like Bayle Domon, Sheriam, Alviarin, the WO foursome etc. which would give a WOT show all its flavour... On a movie or big budget mini-series, this is dealt with by shooting many episodes concurrently, and maybe even all of them (and often by filming the material at one location together etc). That is barely thinkable for a more reasonably budgeted TV show, which produces at a much more hectic pace than a movie or a lavish mini-series like GOT (or any big HBO series). They just can't afford the production staff for that, not even on big shows like Lost, Alias etc. Typically, they will shoot one episode at a time, maybe 2. A few will be in editing, 2 or 3, and usually no more than 2 will be in VFX at once.

VFX cost is less of a problem, IMO. Channelling for eg is what we call a "recipe" type of VFX. Once the effect itself is developped, the more costly lead artists, art directors etc can move on, and juniors are called in to apply the recipe to the shots as they come. A great deal of the more recurring VFX a WOT show would need (weaving, glows etc.) are actually fairly low end and cheap to do stuff once the recipe has been created. That still leaves some fairly costly scenes on a regular TV budget: battles with large number of creatures and so on. Most of the VFX budget would get sucked into episodes with those, leaving not much for the rest.

A good thing about WOT environments is that a great many are recurring, and thus worth investing in: 3D models/matte paintings for TV, the Tower, Caemlyn, Shadar Logoth etc. are all worth the investment. What is not so good is that there's no location unity to speak of... you couldn't have the money to do shots like the arena scenes in Spartacus on a WOT show, because on Spartacus all the (large amounts of money) they invested in shooting and compositing the crowd shots in their 3D arena was to be re used in many, many scenes (thus reducing the cost per minute of those shots). They could never have afforded shots like this had there been less minutes of arena scenes through the season.

And while you extend the sets in 3D, you still need a lot of studio and storage space for the basic sets, and the problems with WOT would remain accute: they would need tons of these, and many of them are recurrent (eg: Caemlyn palace), but with huge gaps (you see it in season 1, then return to it in season three only...). If you're George Lucas doing SW on a massive budget, you trash your basic sets as you're done and rebuild those you need for each movie. For TV, that's just unthinkable, and WOT moves to too many locations way, way too often for regular TV... Having so many basic sets means large studios, and much storage, and it also make the filming costs rise a lot because you constantly have to install, dress, light and then bring down sets. On your usual TV show, sets remain few, require not much dressing (they stay dressed, mostly) and the basic lighting isn't moved... which lets you shoot more scenes a day etc.

TV shows just can't afford to move around too much for filming either, so a WOT production could not envision to use an existing palace as the basic set for Caemlyn to reduce costs, and the countryside around Charleston for Emond's Field etc. When that's done on TV, that's done for shows like Rome, GOT etc. Otherwise, shows are restricted to a certain location unity. Alias had to use LA and its surroundings for everything, and had but few recurrent studio sets. Lost did almost every location in Hawaii (even many flashbacks), which is one reason it could afford such a large recurring cast (which comes nowhere close to what a WOT show would need). A show like B5 (and later BSG) was able to afford a large cast and VFX because most of it was shot with a limited amount of sets, re-arranged and re dressed to stand for many places.

In the end, bringing WOT to TV unless in animation seems massively utopian. Unless you completely denature Jordan's work (removing its soap opera-ish pace and style to make it all more "epic", reducing the recurring cast massivelt by turning most side players into generic, non recurring characters and keep only a very few key guest stars etc.), which would pretty much destroy what's unique to it and turn it into a generic good vs. evil Fantasy story that owes too much to Tolkien, you'd need a soap-like cast and production style, the storytelling pace of a regular fairly big TV show (and 6 or 7 seasons) and the budget of a lavish mini-series. I frankly can't see how all this could be reconciled to make it work, in the real world anyway. The tone and style of WOT would restrain its potential audience outside Jordan's fandom (and we'll see how GOT numbers hold through the season...and if it will manage to really attract that many non-GRRM readers and historical costume drama fans) - it's fairly naive any network would want to have a show like WOT. Most broadcasters would be really afraid to invest in a linear show of that length that would be extremely challenging for new viewers to jump in along the way (past the first season even more), with a limited potential "specialized" audience that will remain fairly young and often not all that loyal (case in point: Heroes s2...)

I don't really understand the obsession of some with wanting WOT to be adapted, truth be told. It seems obvious a story as large is fairly ill suited for TV (WOT isn't as complex as some, but for comparison's sake, just look at the amount of story and the complexity B5 had for a four season arc.. it's nowhere close to WOT's intracy) and would have to lose way too much of its soul to work on screen to make it interesting to readers of the books. It's almost as absurd as hoping someone will produce a MBotF TV show...

There's a lot of eye-candy and cinematic moments in WOT for sure, but IMHO it's far from enough to make it an interesting work for the small screen. The whole humorous and soap-opera-ish nature and tone actually is an interesting aspect to exploit for TV (there is something very B5-ish about WOT) and would appeal to many, but WOT calls for too big a budget to go that way - it would have to aim for the big prime time audiences. It just couldn't survive on the audience of B5 or BSG, let alone of Coronation St and co.