Given what the Wise Ones said about the Forsaken avoiding them, is it surprising that Mesaana would do more to bring her A-game? Whereas Moghedian never acted like she was in a fight - she just wham! grabbed Nynaeve and Birgitte and done. Are you REALLY claiming that the one who got it stuck in and mixed up in a stand-up fight shows more capabilities than the one who was never seen until she struck, and won both her fights straight up? Moghedian struck and had her enemies captured. Her problem was she was acting like Semirhage (as she herself admits) and doing the "gloating villain" thing, which allowed her helpless captives to turn the tables. Mesaana never got that far - she had to fight them straight up, with inferior numbers and troops. Moghedian never relied on the same techniques Mesaana utilizes, because she didn't need to. She WON. When she went up against a natural dreamwalker, she laid a trap that Egwene never saw coming, and was able to break and flee only at the last moment. Moghedian IS that good, and the natives of T'A'R (HotH) walk small around her.

Dude, I seriously respect the attention and thought you give to the supernatural matters, especially given the headaches I get when I start trying to puzzle stuff out, but I think you are a little deficient on underlying combat principles that are the same regardless of what weapons one is using, or what form the battlefield takes. You are looking at the whole encounter with Moghedian as the fight, when in reality, it is more like the post-fight trial-interrogation-execution phase where the good guys have overcome her. Mesaana committed a classic blunder in a limited battle - she took too long at it. When you do this stuff, you should plan for a specific objective and decide what tactic you will use to get it, rather than "start a fight and hope we win." There is a reason why the master of all things military is also a gambler, and why he evades battle so dilligently, and why veteran soldiers pledged themselves to him after a handful of fights where his intelligence and tactical accumen could not have been fully revealed to them yet. It's because anything can happen in a battle, the control of the commanders is strictly illusory, and luck can seem to play an enormous role. They follow Mat because they see how lucky he is, while he tries to avoid a fight because he knows how things can go wrong as easily as right. Mesaana should have been ambushing or assassinating, but she let it come to a running brawl. And lost.