Dead on the money, and hilarious.

I also 100% agree with Cannoli's views and feelings about COT.

It's also close to the feelings expressed by Larry about the COT a long time ago, writing fromt he POV of an ex-reader of Jordan, with no emotional investment in the series at all. Larry understood the initial frustration that the book didn't bring the story forward as much as people expected, and the ensuing inflated wave of harsh bashing typical of the internet era, but objectively he couldn't really see what people who enjoy reading Jordan found so terrible about this book (or so great about the others, for that matter). To him, though it was about a more uneventful part of the story, the book felt in no remarkable way different from the reading experience the few previous books offered. To him, if you genuinely and rationally found COT so bad, you should logically have felt much the same way about WH, or KOD, or LOC.

Many of the reactions to COT were totally emotional, hyperbolic, and innacurate, and objectively were "flaws" that are no more no less present in all the WOT books. Rather than saying "I'm disappointed and displeased that we got his set up/slower part of the story only in this book and that we'll have to wait two more years to get to the events we expected to see in COT", it became totally crazy. Jordan barely ever devoted a sentence to describing a dress (typically, he limited himself to saying someone's dress was dressed in green silk) but you heard that HALF THE BOOK was about long descriptions of dresses, HALF THE BOOK was about silk washing (when there's about a paragraph about it in a scene that's an excuse to be on her own in Malden so she could meet a few people and necessary developments in her situation could be set in place), and the absence of action scenes is wrongly equated with "nothing happens". Tons of things that matter happened in COT (more actually than in some other books, including WH that was mostly a slow and episodic build up of Rand and the core of what would become his new inner circle from now on, geared toward the Cleansing and beyond), none of the important things that happened during COT were of a very physical or action-oriented nature. Rather, Jordan packed a book with all the last details he needed to set in place to be able to reach in one more book (KOD) the point where the finale began. Sure, in hindsight he could have set up, or timed, some things better. Focussing WH on the Cleansing made a fairly good novel, but having it happened before bringing the other storylines to that point made the other contemporary events pale in importance/interest. He couldn't give Elayne the throne fast, or she would have had months left to prepare for the LB and he would have had to invent more and more complications for her afterward, so she stayed in the situation he needed her to be for TG. He had to put Egwene and Rand on standby, because both had nearly reached the point he wanted their storylines in the finale to begin. He needed a lot of room to deal with Mat, he couldn't just rush in a few episodes through his relationship with Tuon or it just wouldn't have been in any way believable. He had sent Perrin too soon to Ghealdan, or made him lose Faile too early (or had returned to that storyline earlier than he should have to avoid a whole book without any Perrin - the fans's responses are responsible for this, the bashing had been so loud the last time he did that with Mat that Jordan made the decision not avoid this from now on) - so he needed to make it progress slowly, with only a few chapters in each book, because it wasn't about Perrin moving on to many other adventures, he was already in his last episode before TG. TGS and TOM shed a lot of light on what RJ had planned, and why he made some earlier decisions. It also made completely absurb and ridiculous the accusations we often hear that he was "stretching it" on purpose. It's the exact opposite. He was anxious to get to the finale since POD, so much he had already advanced Egwene, Perrin, Elayne and Rand to their pre-TG starting point. It's not advancing Mat in parallel in POD that hurt him, then it was advancing Rand too much in WH. Then it was his concept for COT, to have all the storylines begin on the same day, and all deal with the Cleansing. He realized way too far into the writing that doing things that way, instead of having created ellipses and picking up each storyline at different times made it impossible to properly build up to each climax within that single book, not with also solving the problem that a great deal more still had to be told about Mat. So the book reached cliffhangers, stall poinst, and KOD inherited the last acts of all those storylines. And to make that happen, he probably made Perrin run a bit more in circle than planned, stopped advancing Egwene too much, put Rand on hold, and most likely went into more details than planned with Elayne's rise. He had to do something like this, otherwise he ended up with the storylines totally out of synch with one another, or he gave to Mat and Tuon a very unsastifying fast forward and totally unbelievable relationship, a fiasco that could be compared to how George Lucas dealt with the relationship of Padmé and Anakin in SW, trimming it down so much what was supposed to be a central foundation of his story became the weakest and most laughable part of the prequels (no one above 7 could believe this was a real love relationship). For fans of WOT (the whole thing, not only some aspects of it), the Mat-Tuon storyline alone is worth COT and KOD.