People tend to forget that the "pace" of AMOL was set by RJ himself - not Brandon, and that he had planned all along a finale that was an avalanche of events, where everything he had set in place (sometime painstakingly.. for the readers) would start falling into place like dominoes.

If a criticism can be made about RJ's choices, it's that he played it "too close to the vest" and didn't find ways to spread out the developments, so that he could include more in the "set up" books. It might also end up feeling "too neat" or mechanical, that pile of dominoes all falling into place at once... we'll see. It will depend in part on how good the pay-offs are.

We'll see reading the books, of course, but it's a bit predictable that his choice to keep almost everything for the "last book" might feel what some will call "rushed", because it's a non-stop feast of resolution, many of which are no doubt "predicatable" to hardcore fans. Some of that already happened with KOD - many called the resolution for Aram "rushed". It hardly was, RJ had spent pages and pages in the previous books setting it up, the last clue was placed in the torture scene at the end of COT. Others called the battle of Malden "rushed". To me, it felt like a battle should be - everything fast and chaotic, and I thought RJ wiser than many other writers to narrow the scope so much and follow mostly Perrin and Faile only, because I assume in a battle like this, you see very little. I also hold to the view that RJ was never building things up to Malden, that it wasn't the climax of Faile's capture (all those "all that for this" comments), merely the last big turning point toward the resolution of Perrin's storyline, which we will now see in TOM).

Like you, I think the major difference if RJ had written the finale would have been that, assuming he split the books and he split it in three - personally I think he would have split it in two - the first one ending with the start of the LB, so pretty much how TOM is supposed to end) he would not have made Brandon's choice to tell the story so much in a non-linear fashion (I mean, I don't think RJ would have chosen to focus on only Rand and Egwene first, then return to Perrin and Mat on the same timeline. IMO, RJ would have chosen to run with all the storylines in parallel, and quite possibly picked the climax of TOM as the end of his first book. I'm convinced Brandon wrote TGS/TOM longer than RJ would have, because it's terribly hard to condense them more than that for him, in part because of his writing style where he needs to "spell things out" and make them happen on-screen, and he also feels tied to RJ's notes, and doesn't want to cut developments RJ had outlined, so he does his best to include everything he can. RJ himself would have had no such qualms about editing his own ideas (he left tons of "maybes" in the outline and notes, as Brandon said). RJ was also quite the expert at "multi-purposes" chapters, and could develop storylines by mere allusions by side characters in POVs about other things altogether (the story of a lot of minor players was developped this way.. we heard more about Lelaine/Romanda from observers in Salidar than we've seen them on screen, for instance). For all his good work, Brandon wasn't as good as RJ at mastering the players in the background, and focussed the scenes in TGS around fewer characters too. A good example is the Aviendha chapters in TGS. The way Brandon wrote it, he needed a few chapters to make it work, because only one would have felt totally rushed. The way RJ used to write stuff like this, he would have required one Aviendha POV, and the rest would have been developped to allusions in other POVs, and apparitions by Aviendha in the background, as RJ loved to imply, and to make us work to understand what's going on. Brandon has a more direct style, that requires him to "spell things out" more. In a book like AMOL, this results in taking many more chapters to develop the plot than it would have taken if written in RJ's style. The "late books" were slow not because RJ's style is slow, but because the plot had become so complicated (in sheer number of side players and small issues to remind the reader about alone.. the plot itself is not very comple that with each book he needed 5 or 6 slow "intro chapters", where he mostly just re introduced everything and everyone. If one read the Perrin chapters since his departure from Cairhien, and do the mental exercice of imagining the intro chapters gone, the few new things in them put in the other chapters (eg: Berelain telling Perrin about the murder of her spies, etc.), the storyline is actually quite fast paced.