You're taking the view that aesthetics is the primary criteria to determine if a book is good or not. That's certainly valid, and that's certainly a major factor when determining the cultural value of a book, but that's more for me a way to separate great, culturally meaningful literature from literature at large.

Anyone who would try to claim Robert Jordan has achieved with WOT a work of great cultural importance, a future classic, really needs to read more.

But as far as I'm concerned, the aesthetic insignificance of Jordan's work doesn't make him a bad writer, not just part of the great and outstanding ones. He was still in many ways a good craftsman, with some obvious weaknesses (unlike Dan Brown or S. Meyers, for instance) - and a better storyteller, forums like this being a testimony to his power in that respect. The form of WOT certainly leaves a lot to be desired aesthetically, but on the whole it remains a good and fairly well told story, despite being terribly conventional writing-wise, and despite structural problems that tells less about Jordan's skills than about his wisdom of writing something so long, knowing each book would be published and after that there was no time machine to go back and fix what seemed good ideas at the time but proved problematic two-three books later. He's not Flaubert, and certainly not Nabokov. He's more like a modern Dumas.