Two things regarding all that date blather - even if someone HAD survived all that, this White Tower also lost track of the date and the year TWICE over the course of its history. Even if someone HAD lasted from the AoL to the founding of the White Tower, there is no reason they could not STILL forget the weave. Secondly, the books say NO Aes Sedai survived the Breaking. While it might have been possible for one to survive, none did. Period. And there is no reason to assume they WOULD, even if they COULD. One method used to mark the end of the Breaking is the death of the last male Aes Sedai, and female Aes Sedai could very well have been favorite targets of the madmen. Remember, these are not random nutjobs, their madness comes from the Dark One's touch and in every case we have seen, it has manifested itself as delusions which incite or inspire violence and destruction. They were not randomly wandering around doing wierd stuff, they were turned into beings bent on destruction, and quite probably perversely attracted to horror and atrocity, as in the case of LTT who specifically targeted his family.

Why not? On what do you base that rather large leap? Male channelers are widely feared and their untrained destructive capabilities are taken very seriously. In Rand's portal stone life, he can alter the course of battles with a little surreptitious channeling here or there, and his ability is untrained and unreliable, but it is enough to win enough battles for a country boy from the ass end of nowhere to rise rapidly in the ranks of the Queen's Guard. The Seanchan damane are not very skilled, but are sufficient to be the basis of the power of a continent-occupying Empire.

The point in the gathering of Aes Sedai into a single, unified group was that when you have ALL the channelers, you will tend to win, no matter how half-assed they are. This is why they tolerate no other groups of channelers, whether or not they call themselves Aes Sedai. Also, their practice has been to claim superiority and fake what they can't do or don't know. How is anyone supposed to gainsay their abilities? The fact that they are incapable of sophisticated or complex weaves is small comfort to the men slaughtered by simple, direct and clumsy blasts of fire & lightning and moving earth!

Not in the least. Your reasoning is based on a couple of faulty notions. Firstly, your assumption that due to the duration of the Breaking (and it is said more than once that these are not hard and fast numbers) some channelers MUST have survived. During the Breaking, there is every reason they would have been primary targets of their insane male counterparts, and what is more, those who were members of the Servants of All, or connected to them by tradition, would almost certainly have taken it upon themselves to confront and attempt to stop the madmen, and thus be MORE likely to fall. And even setting the rest of that aside, humanity was reduced to the Stone Age equivalent of technology and civilization. There is no reason to believe that sisters were living their full lifespans, and many reasons to believe otherwise, not least because THE BOOKS SAY THEY DID NOT.

Secondly, given that we have absolutely NO knowledge of the Aes Sedai of the AB era, beyond a handful of names of faction leaders and administrators, your assumption that they MUST have had an unbroken tradition of advanced tutelage. For all we know, they were barely capable of touching the Source at will. However, even a tiny ability, when others have none, can be sufficient advantage, particularly when the rest of the nations had not yet got their act together and there would not yet have been many large armies or sophisticated infrastructures to support other forms of power. It would have been a world where brute strength ruled, and even a half-assed One Power ability, used well or effectively, can trump a lot of muscle-men. You have no basis beyond their apparent political success for assuming particular levels of skill, and even those results say nothing about about their sophistication with the Power, only their POLITICAL skills. Or maybe you know the make-up of the "Tower forming" weave? What about the "political unification" weave? Ooo! I know! The ultra-hyper-sophisticated "organization & administration" weave! Yes! Plainly these Talents could ONLY have come from the AoL!