Much the same way it took three readings of ACoS before I actually started to like, even respect, the book: It's good in it's own right, but it's in a totally different class than TSR-LoC.

I'm not sure what you mean by saying ToM exposes flaws in RJs overall pacing though, since it seems almost frantic in comparison to most of the later volumes languid speed (though not nearly as bad as KoD, which went back and forth from breathless exposition to painfully slow stretches of Perrin planning and brooding, primarily the latter). If the pacing in earlier books was bad, I'd expect ToM to be a pleasant change and, regardless, if you're saying that a book Sanderson wrote almost entirely, except for RJs notes, reveals flaws in RJs pacing of the earlier books, it sounds like you're kind of going for a shotgun spread at both authors.

For what it's worth, I agree with you about RJs pacing, at least in part, but I think there were a number of extenuating circumstances, most notably terminal illness. The day I joined wotmania I was convinced that RJ intended the series to have either twelve or thirteen books, depending on which he wanted to emphasize as the magic number (and, obviously, my money was on thirteen). I also thought he'd been deliberately dragging out the story since the end of ACoS because he didn't think he had enough plot to get to thirteen books, and that he'd wasted too MUCH time doing it so that he was going to have to cram all the things he should've been writing into the last one or two books in order to keep it to thirteen. I've yet to see much reason to revise those opinions, apart from RJs statement that the series would be a dozen books come hell or high water (of course, that ship has sailed). I don't think that's as much a failure of his mind as of his body though; I know the quality of my posts went to hell in a handbasket when I got a job and got engaged, because having a real life meant I didn't have thirty hours a day to spend carefully crafting MB posts. Granted I project too much, and the stakes were much higher for Jordan, but I suspected long before I experienced it first hand that essentially the same thing happened to him but to a far greater degree.