More like a continuum, much like the continuum between inaccessible arthouse movies on the one end and mindless blockbusters on the other. There's a lot of room in the middle. A blanket statement that the WoT characterizations are "wafer thin" is just not correct. There's a lot of caricature characters to be sure, because there's just an insane amount of characters, more than in almost every other written work I know of. The main characters are fleshed out plenty, though. Of course you said "most often", implying that you agree some characters are more fleshed out, and that it's all the caricature Aes Sedai and others that you object to, but then that would just mean that you dislike the Wheel of Time's structure with all the PoVs, characters and subplots in subplots. Because I really don't think it would be feasible to write anything like it while making your hundreds of characters fully fleshed out.

And of course your line about not understanding why some people try to make Jordan into a "master supreme" is just a big strawman, so you can easily attack an extreme claim that fionwe never made, while avoiding his actual, much more valid statements. He's not wrong that the description those people made of the series was rather, shall we say, small-minded and petty. Certainly a far cry from academic, which makes one wonder just what the target audience for this book is. It's not academics, and it's not your run-of-the-mill fantasy fan, those two things are for sure.