I have the same feelings at times. Though my writing would almost certainly have been poor and clunky and probably over-engineered and redundant enough to make people fling tGS out the nearest window in disgust less than halfway through, I really think I would have nailed the characters better. I think I would have produced an Egwene more satisfying to the Egwene fans (and I would certainly have been unable to resist shading her as I see her) than Sadnerson's versions of most of the characters were to serious readers in general.

Bah. He exists solely to service my WoT needs.

This in particular. People make mistakes and someone has to backstop him. You would think the fact that he is a relative tyro handling such established material that was first published when he was in junior high school would have led to extra scrutiny by the editing people, from Harriet and Maria to the Tor staff.

I wonder how much of a damn they gave. In their position, I can envision people who don't give a damn, merely being content to pass RJs material along to the fans and rake in the money for facilitating a love affair they don't understand, like the proprietor of a no-tell motel. As for the Jordan people, if you are right on what you cite as RJ's strengths further down, maybe their function was more to be cheerleaders and sounding boards, rather than partners or collaborators. A lot of what RJ said on the subject of his ideas and inspirations and being an Old Testament god to his characters suggests WoT was extremely personal for him and came exclusively from him. Even if Harriet did contribute significantly to his work, I think their personal relationship came into play a lot there. Recall what he said about her ability to know when he had been writing certain characters and so on. I think it goes without saying that she and B-Sand never developed a working relationship on any sort of comparable level. Given RJ's presumptive ability to keep all the plots and so forth straight, and his innate understanding of the things he created and envisioned, maybe Maria, Harriet and even the more appreciative or involved publishing staff were used to perhaps making no more than cursory checks and editing efforts and trusting RJ. With habits like this formed over more than a decade of writing, it should not be surprising that they overlooked Sanderson's need for more involved participation on their parts. And who is to say a more collaborative arrangement would have been possible? For all we know, Sanderson is the kind of guy who does it all on his own with his books and would not have performed well or comfortably as the stenographer for Team Jordan.

There is also the process through which Sanderson was selected. All I have heard of that strikes me as rather appalling in the reasons and slipshod in the due diligence. Granted, WoT is hardly an issue on which lives and fortunes may rest, but the tale of Harriet being so moved by his eulogy that she offered him the job and approved him so quickly was horrifying.

I rather think he did the best he could and was simply the wrong writer for the task. Having never so much as heard his name before he was announced as the writer, I expected an author with a significant body of work, or work of appropriate complexity to WoT. I was shocked to find out how relatively little he had written, was dismayed to find how short and uncomplex his novels appeared at first glance in the book store, and was as close to tears as I have ever come in regards to WoT when I read the first couple of chapters of Mistborn. Your own defense of Sanderson when I posted some of my concerns on the MB reassured me, and his own accounts of his efforts have made me view him as less of a villain, but having read tGS, I no longer had any expectations for the remaining books. In some ways, I felt ToM was worse, despite material that I would certainly have enjoyed more than tGS even if both had been written by RJ, and though I don't have any literary analysis skills to speak of, I could see how many of the flaws were borne of the split in the books which RJ had never intended.

A Memory of Light is probably going to seem like a silly title for book 14. I can see why Sanderson wanted to keep it for all three volunes with AMoL:tGS, AMoL:ToM and AMoL:Blabbity-blah making more sense. As it is, tGS describes the gathering and dispelling of the MAJOR storm, and aMoL will probably better detail the RETURN of light. A Memory of Light suggests darkness all but triumphant, when Rand has broken through all of that already, and everyone is coming together. That meeting might have been better too, if it had been established before Rand's change and so forth had really sunk in, so that it might have appeared to be the last ditch chance for everyone to avert the disaster Dark Rand might be bringing on them, only to have the reader share in their experience of Light Rand's conversion and changing their minds and gaining their faith and trust. Elayne's insistence on his goodness and so forth as felt through the warder bond (and its attendant effects on her surroundings) might have been more effective for the drama of the story and maybe giving their relationship some actual significance if her part was reduced, rather than fleshed out to fill a portion of an whole novel and set in a way that was not readily apparent to the readers who are also reading about St. Rand the Transfigured. If her experience (and Min's & Aviendha's, though they are out of contact with anyone else) through the bond is the sole bright spot and hope that anyone has of Rand's change, I think the whole picture changes a lot and the justification of his claims, or his bond-holders' willingness to place their faith in him no matter how bad things look to anyone (readers included) who have witnessed or experienced Dark Rand in action would have worked better if handled differently. As it is, Elayne's cheerful attitude to his changes and insistence on his goodness don't square with her intention to support Egwene in opposing him, however the confrontation will actually play out, and give me one more reason to question the whole purpose of their relationship (and I don't care about triple goddesses and the like - no one needed that in the story or would have missed it if it was absent and two more volumes than RJ wanted, both of which featured Rand interacting exclusively with Min undermines any "triple" aspect of his love life; as the series stands, Rand has one love interest and two odd working relationships with ex-flings, despite some creative chronology in the "ex" aspects).
As it is, we are going into the big meeting annoyed at the opposition and absurd contentions of characters that he is wrong and has to be convinced otherwise.

Yes. What I was getting at.

I like to think Hinderstap & Ghenji might have contributed to this. Rather than the overt comic relief, I think Mat might instead have provided a kind of layman's view of the horrors, rather than a part of them as Rand and Egwene were. Mat would have been the one to really articulate how bad the world of WoT was sinking.
Egwene might have been better told as a sort of voice of sanity as the Tower descends into unreasoned conflict and viciousness getting out of hand, or as a participant in the in-fighting and strife, giving HER an epiphany at the end as well. I think her extraction following the Seanchan raid was intended to involve more than saving her from (by then non-existent) physical danger, but rather saving her from herself, and what the Tower strife had done to her. Siuan & Gawyn would have pulled her free to give her a chance to see what the whole sordid mess had turned into, her subsequent decision to invade Tar Valon been made to seem more tragic and more in the nature of lancing a sore or excising a cancer than Sanderson bothered to play it. The hints and preliminary notes were there, but he didn't really develop them much or make them explicit enough in the time he gave to that. Then her acceptance as Amyrlin by her former enemies might have been seen as a similar bright spot in parallel with Rand's epiphany. Just as his brief experience of the Seanchan rule and the Seanchan-approved charity of the Tinkers, contrasted with his own self-loathing, sparked the epiphany in Rand and led to his choice to spare the world, so the restoration of sanity to the Tower and the submission of the loyalists might have worked a similar conversion in Egwene.

And highlighted the fact that Rand and Egwene WERE out of control and even Mat, while in authority in his group, was navigating a mess of horrors.
That revelation might actually have been mandated by RJ. It would have been one of those sparks that helped re-kindle Rand's light. The news of her death was the catalyst for a lot, after all. It set in motion Moiraine's plans that led to her disappearance, and in such close proximity to Moiraine's death, no doubt contributed to Rand's subsequent angst. While Moiraine's death got all the attention (mostly because Morgase was not so important to the readers and her death merely freed up the throne for her daughter who was fast rising in significance as a character, while motivating another battle/conquest for Rand, bringing him to the apex of his worldly power and superficial coolness), it resulted from Morgase's, which also had a significant contribution to Rand's self-loathing and rejection of love, since the one woman who had openly showed interest in him had lost her mother to his failure (and given the political nature of their conversations, Elayne probably only name-dropped Morgase half a million times in Tear). The restoration of Moiraine too, probably should have come closer in print to Rand's rehabilitation, and be part of the general flare of hope his epiphany engendered.

You think that's bad, what about those of us who simply lack the understanding of writing or analytical abilities to do even that much? I'm not sure who has it worse: someone like me who can see enough to know that something's wrong, and maybe point to a few details (if you love the noun "force" so much, Sanderson, why don't you just marry it? ), or the saps who can't even tell that much, and take the errors by Sanderson as fact and use them as a basis for their understandin of the story!

Back before I knew anything one way or another about B-Sand or how he would write this, I believe I said I would like both a finished novel and RJ's notes at some point afterwards so we can crosscheck the novels.
The one remaining hope is that aMoL gets a lot of things right, and that ToM is a mess from trying reconcile the perhaps too-easy-at-first-glance decision of how to write tGS, and an aMoL which is closer to what RJ was trying for. The mess of ToM suggests and effort to repair or patch over the blunder in making tGS as it is, which perhaps B-Sand & Team Jordan were too committed to to back out of (and still get us a book during the Obama administration) before the problems began to arise. Even if he felt it necessary to split the three books, I think it might have been better to write them all as one super-book and once finished release them all within months of each other. That would alleviate the issues with bookstores and the physical medium, and I think now that we might have preferred better editing and a more coherent schedule to getting books in '09 & '10. Really, in retrospect, a five or six year wait is not much worse than the four year wait we endured between KoD & tGS.

Yes. I want a story. Let Larry & co have the literature and congratulate themselves on better taste. But the kind of story Sanderson tells is why I hardly read the genre anymore.

I'll give him that, though it does not seem to be my taste. Honestly, I have to say I really think he's done the best he can with WoT, and was simply the wrong man for the job.