Shoo. This is my last real WoT pleasure. Let's not change the game at this late date. Facts don't matter. Fionwe1987 and I will rise to the bait, no matter what.



Except for the reason you give, my thinking on her omission was that she failed. When you get right down to it, she did her best, but only succeeded in alienating him further. I'm not criticizing her, merely suggesting that she is mortal and fallible and there is the possibility that she may have undertaken a task that was beyond her ability (wow, I seem to be saying stuff like that a lot these days). Rand's point was, I believe, that he was able to come back to himself because of the grounding he had to work with. "I was better brought up this time" strongly implies as much, and does not account for the influence of a woman he met earlier in this year. Cadsuane herself noted in tGS that Rand already had a good moral grounding when she observes that he reacts to his sudden rise to power better than most people in his position do. As for the presence of his girlfriends on the list, when push comes to shove, moral behavior is all about how you treat or relate to other people, and the three women have all been instrumental in how he deals with the people around him at the time. Elayne helps him deal with the nobility of Tear, Aviendha with the Aiel and Min gets him out of his funk (that was not entirely about "raping" her - he was already in a bad place thanks to his LTT issues and captivity, and that caused him to view his actions in a negative light) and adjusts his perspective to once more be receptive to bringing people to his cause, as opposed to shoving them away.
I wonder if awareness of the bond would also have played a bigger role in Rand's realization had RJ written the book. Sanderson really seemed to struggle with that in tGS - in scenes where previously Rand and Min had used the bond as a kind of sixth sense to perceive one another with in their scenes together in WH, CoT & KoD, they never seemed aware of it until they were apart in tGS. I can't help but think that in RJ's words, at the nadir of his rage on Dragonmount, there would have been that little unaltering, unwavering speck of emotion through the bond that he couldn't deny no matter his rage or hardness.