But what it boils down to is she cost the Shadow another high level operative, and loses her power base, being forced to flee and hide. Elayne was far more successful in KoD but everyone whines about her getting dead weight like Vandene and Sareitha killed, with far less culpability on her part than Graendal with Aran'gar. All this was doing was managing a defeat.

She sucked! How can you think this POSSIBLY reflects well on Moghedian? Thanks to this moment, Nynaeve because so invincibly awesome, RJ didn't use her as a PoV character again for more than three brief vignettes. Think about that - all Moghedian did was trigger her arch-nemesis's ascension to the heights of her character maturation. As for Moghedian herself, her whole PoV reflects much better on Nynaeve than herself! Her reaction to Nynaeve is typical of ordinary people reacting to the Forsaken! Nynaeve is so in her head that she doesn't have to even be threatening Moghedian - the very sight of the woman walking from a carriage to a boat sends Moghedian into a tailspin, freaks her out and causes her to make a dangerous diversion from her own mission (given by a man with the power to destroy her with a twitch of his finger, who has her so whipped she voluntarily addresses him as "my owner" - the guy holding that level of power and control over her, who is in the practice of taunting her by casually threatening to crush her mindtrap, is STILL not as terrifying to the Spider, as the mere sight of Nynaeve al'Meara walking down the street), cause the one member of the Forsaken most known for caution and stealth and patience to throw all those qualities out the window and blast away with her biggest gun, a weapon the Forsaken fear to use, a ferry boat moving away from her. And she's in such a panic she flubs the shot. What is more, Nynaeve is saved because she is so awesome that she inspires the most badass deadly warrior in the world to pursue her so ardently that he shows up right in the nick of time to rescue her from drowning. Who'd do that for Moghedian?

Oh, shit! That farmboy is chasing me! I need the ultimate power source in the universe, quick! And Rand was not lucky, aside from being "lucky" he was clever enough to take a ter'angreal to a One Power fight, and smart enough to figure out what the black wires did. Ta'veren had nothing to do with it, aside from putting him in so much danger that he had accumulated much better survival & combat instincts than Asmodean to that point. If he were not ta'veren, he'd have been in no danger at all, still back on the farm reflecting how nice life had been since Egwene left for the White Tower.