This is a very lame and bureaucrat-like argument. No storyteller worth the name would think this way.

That's like saying "let's not have a character say this even if this is perfect for the scene and story, because later I might move the scene and I will have to correct a few words". If a writer did that sort of things, his work would get so boring so fast no one would read it. They write a scene as they feel it needs to be written, and if they decide to move it elsewhere, they make the adjustments it requires.

Brandon has an editing team to handle that sort of things. It takes but a few minutes to Maria to look up her chronology file (she keeps it up to date as he writes), tell Brandon on which day the chapter he's writing takes place and to remind him what scenes - as the book stands now - are currently set to happen chronologically in Rand's, Perrin's, Mat's storyline... Brandon throws that sort of questions at Maria all the time (and did... Perrin saw Rand in Tear pre-Arad Doman and so on... Brandon already asked the questions!!! It's his choice to come up with a generic moment, not because he's too lazy to ask Maria about the timelines of the various scenes!).

The visions in TGS/TOM feel "different" because Brandon used them differently than Jordan did. Brandon stopped for the most part using them as chronology markers. He just made a point of keeping those visions in the books for continuity's sake. He put enough bland and generic visions in scenes where they didn't interrupt the narrative flow too much.

Jordan used them differently, He doubled up the purpose of mentionning those visions from time to time (which we know are building up to something important in some way in the finale - and that's why Brandon had to keep mentionning them!!) with the requirement to give the readers a chronology marker (and a few times, Jordan included one for humour - Min and Rand having sex, for eg). It was one of RJ's habits, once he started having out of synch story lines, to regularly provide the readers with such markers - easy to remember ones like this, or more subtle ones for readers with a greater sense of time or a better memory (people who keep track intuitively of mentions of the moon as they read etc. - a lot of people can do that...). Some readers totally ignore such things as they don't care about the chronology or it's not important to their reading pleasure to "keep track" of such things (like there are many that ignore any map in a book systematically - including people who have little geographical sense, to evoke distances and proportions out of a map). There are many readers for whom this is important, who get distracted or annoyed if they can't keep a mental "greater picture" as they read (it comes with an analytical mind, the habit to make links etc. ). Jordan himself (like Tolkien, incidentally) was most likely the second kind of reader himself. Brandon is of the first kind, apparently - or he would have felt the need to include a great deal more time markers. It's not like we can just switch off that part of our brain, no more than those who ignore such markers could be forced to start memorizing them as they read!

For readers of the second type (as I am, like tons of people), it's perfectly legitimate to be annoyed by the fact Brandon abandonned the timeline markers. It is a big deal to us (and of course, those of the first type don't have that problem... ). It gets very distracting, and it's made worse by the fact a) Sanderson decided to have scenes out of chronological order and b) Jordan always left so many markers so we're totally used to read WOT with a mental map of the various timelines.

That's not a book breaking bug, but that still changes the experience of reading WOT a very great deal. For years we've been used to mentally place each scene in a greater picture of the story as we read. In the last two books that's all but impossible, and it gets very distracting when you've been used to read that story another way for years.

It's the very same thing as people who have troubles keeping track of minor characters, found it distracting when they had to stop and think who this and that was, and hated that Jordan had so many of those. It's the same thing as those who got annoyed with the repetitive patterns (mentions of dresses, or gestures) and found it deterred their enjoyment of the series.