That's valid only if you insist to look at COT as a stand-alone novel.

It's more obvious now that we can see the scope of what Jordan had in mind for his finale.

It's too huge, too ambitious, to be narrated as one novel. As it turned out, it needed five. But those five books (three, in Jordan's mind) form a whole. COT is written and paced the way the first third of Jordan's books are. KOD is paced and written like the central core of a WOT book, and AMOL is the last act.

COT was Jordan's attempt to bring all the storylines to the point where AMOL starts. He realized along the way it could not be done, and instead of rewriting the book, he kept the second half of all the storylines for KOD. Jordan gave up attempting to make a stand-alone out of COT. To do that, he would have had to cut many storylines from it, and develop more the rest, e.g. the book would have been mostly focussed on Perrin, with minimal episodes for the others (but careful to include everyone, as when he attempted to leave some characters out as their story didn't really develop during that timeline and they should be left out, many of the fans were outraged and he decided to stop doing ellipses... which means he had to create extra episodes that don't really advance anything just to have them in the books.), then the next book would have dealt with Perrin, and a third with Egwene and so on, each covering the timeline from pre-Cleansing to the point AMOL begins. Or he could split them chronologically, with the first half of each storylines in one book, and the second half in the other. This got him to the finale faster and this is what he ended up doing, and yes it was a bit frustrating to read until KOD came out. But yes, I still enjoyed COT, and more so after reading KOD. It's really not so different from the rest of Jordan's writing.

COT is less satisfying than the novels like TSR or TFOH. Yes, for sure. But COT was part of the price to pay to get AMOL, with the full scope of it. It needed a great deal of groundwork, difficult to achieve if Jordan had to keep creating episodic/adventures he didn't need, and it's what Jordan accomplished with COT and KOD You can critize Jordan for having been overambitious and been forced to write books like COT as a result, but if not for COT and KOD, AMOL would have to have the scope and complexity of the earlier books too. After WH, with the Cleansing that completed the mid-series, the big climax was TG. Had Jordan kept creating episodic climaxes to make his books "eventful" and work better as stand-alones, it's not two more books he would have needed to reach AMOL, it's four or five.

As for my issues with Sanderson's books being chalked up to "it's about style", you completely misunderstand the whole thing.

I was rather happy with TGS until I read TOM and realized what a mess the book split had done, and what he had done the global story to make TGS what it is. I had specific and on the whole minor issues with TGS (I wasn't expecting Sanderson to write like Jordan, I never did), but I still enjoyed it. It's only reading TOM it became apparent how Sanderson had butchered the finale as planned by Jordan by splitting the books the way he did. TOM is a really, really terrible novel, made of fairly good episodes. The problem isn't the story, it's largely a structural problem that completely disregarded the dramatic progression planned for AMOL and really undermined the material. I can't even compare TOM to the rest of WOT. It's in a league of its own. Reading it was not enjoyable at all. And yes, I had far more fun reading COT, even after I realized not much would happen in it and I had to get over my frustration with that (like everybody else, except many never got over it).