No, not "always". There are plenty of reasons why a writer intentionally would decide not to. One of them is writing a character who doesn't pay attention, another is a stylistic choice, ie: wanting to elevate the dialogue from the mundane to the more abstract etc. It's done often in literature, with intent.

It's not doing so in the context of WOT, where you have a series built in a very classic form of storytelling, adhering to several rules of popular literature, which was lazy of Sanderson's part. And it doesn't speak of literary choices at all, it's just not really doing his job of novelist. Sanderson's good at structuring stories, developping action, building climaxes and so on. Normally he also contols his cast much more, but he seems to have massive problems handling WOT's. But Sanderson's work lack polish. He seems to lose interest in his work really fast, and when he does he put the work on the shelf and start a new one, to return to give a new round of polish to the first one years later only. Obviously he couldn't do that with WOT, so it's like we get an unfinished work, like a dish that needs to simmer for hours that instead Sanderson cooked very fast at higher temperature. It's eatable, but the meat won't be very tender, the aromas didn't have the time to develop and meld together to form complex tastes. WOT's no great work of literature, but some of its appeals were its great attention to details, the numerous side elements, the recurrent apparitions of side players for a sentence or a paragraph here and there only.

Jordan developped the story through layers of perpections, bringing us into the perspectives of the various players. Sanderson has turned the 3p limited POV into something much closer to omni POV, far more remote and impersonal. the 3PLPOV has become more like a camera showing scenes centered on the POV character than a real 3PLPOV. The whole thing is more like a movie starring the WOT characters than it feels like WOT. We get the events for sure, but we've lost most of the perspectives on the events.

Make no mistake, if you look at Elantris or the first Mistborn, you'd find the same issues, which were brought up frequently in reviews of these books. The younger Sanderson relied heavily raw dialogue, sometimes pages and pages of it, as if he were writing for the stage or for a visual medium (be it comic book, movie, TV etc.). except he's a novelist and in novels since the invention of the form itself it's been considered the job of the writer to provide the reader with eyes.

In the case of WOT it's especially noticeable because Jordan wasn't by a choice a psychological writer, he wouldn't go into long disgressions to get the readers to delve on the way his characters were thinking, all he gave us were those descriptions and apartés during POV scenes. This was a huge part of how the characters came to life. You remove those and much of what made the characters who they were is gone, they become cartoon characters. Just think of the Forsaken whom readers find too cartoonish, it's largely because they never appeared much and with Jordan it's only through POVs characters got a chance to become fleshed out. It's in the Forsaken POVs, or when they're seen through POVs, that they became interesting. Some of those who got the most POV unsurprisingly are fans's favorite, and became favorite after their first POV (that's the case of Semirhage and Demandred in LOC). Jordan played heavily in perceptions through POVs and "POV traps", all this extra information beside the dialogue lines are hugely responsible for the fact readers of WOT have the habit of falling into "camps", identifying very personally with this or that character, disliking intensely another, or his values or behaviour. The debates about characters have fallen to an all time low since Sanderson is at the helm, because we no longer have any material aside from dialogue... We can no longer point out that Egwene thinks that way, we're down to Egwene said this or seemingly acted that way. We no longer know how she justify her own actions, or why she thinks this or that, and that seems to me to be because Sanderson rushed too much, and never got the time to stand back and reflect on this, then work to integrate this in the novel. He gave us the barebone events, mostly, a draft.

Jordan used the 3p limited POV heavily to present things from a single character's perspective. Reality was reality according to this character, and he loved to put twists by presenting other visions of things in other POVs later.

The POVs used to be very different, with subtleties. Some of his characters were very observant and others were less. Cultural biases were showing all the time. They all had their special objects of interest and disinterest. A POV of Nynaeve would have a lot of inner commentary on people with a good dose of bad faith (much like Mat, if not on the same issues and not on the same tone), and observation of her surroundings especially if she's outdoors. People complain Sanderson doesn't get Mat's humour... well.. that's because most of Mat's humour came from his personal vision of what happened around him, and that's largely gone and we see Mat act the fool instead of thinking something pretty crazy but hiding his opinion in his acts. Rand used to think the clothes of the people he interracted with beneath notice unless they were dressed in a way that could outshine him. Etc.

Sanderson levelled all this out. He artificially added observations for people for whom they were out of characters. Rand would not have described Bashere's pants or Nynaeve's belt, but he would notice if Logain wears something too ostentatious to his taste,and has added a pin with his personal sigil, for instance. All these things made Rand Rand. If you read chapter 1 of TGS superficially, you might conclude comments about clothes were "very Jordan" and Brandon was making efforts there as in his books he normally doesn't do that. Problem is, this wasn't Jordan-like at all, because it was done in the wrong place and only goes to demonstrate Brandon didn't pay enough attention to characterization or was completely overwhelmed by RJ's attention to details like that.

He did include a lot more qualifiers in dialogue than he had done in his own books at that point (his personal style has evolved more toward Jordan's since he began to work on WOT), but most aren't used very cleverly.

Another example of inexperience (or incompetence) is that Brandon obviously noticed Jordan used a lot of symbolism in the locations, descriptions etc. Brandon attempted that, with reasonable success, but it's very heavy handed... he will for instance flat out state in a description that the Tower is like a metaphor for this or that, that a building seems to represent this or that. Not to mention that Brandon's descriptive passages most often don't flow well were too generic. His wind scenes go on forever, for instance, totally overdone.



There's some, it just isn't well done. It's too often generic, and it doesn't include the informative disgressions about other events and so on, devices which ended up being economic because they let Jordan deal with side events most often only like this, with succinct mentions of new developments (which made our minds spin as they were always just tantalizing and were making wonder what it meant), without having to devote scenes to those events. Abandonning this has reduced the scope of the series a lot. People wonder what suddenly happened to the cast of secondary and tertiary characters. Well... first that happened. Most of their apparitions happened only through brief disgressions/mentions by POV characters. Jordan was quite expert at this. He could have one scene with the BA hunter in the prologue, and for the rest of the books we would have only clues that events were moving through mentions by Alvarin, for e.g., noticing strange behaviour of one Hunter during a meeting with Elaida. After one scene in TPOD, the whole Borderlander storylines was handled this way (then in TGS it was dropped until Brandon pulled them out of his hat at the end, now in Far Madding) Egwene's POVs often advanced 5 or 6 arcs or more this way, giving the impression she had tons to juggle with, and that tons of things were happening in the rebel camp... without having to show on screen any of that. Jordan's scenes were often more static - a great deals were one sort or another of meeting - but they were always multi-purpose. Brandon's scenes fill for the most part a single purpose, requiring him to need many more short scenes to develop those smaller events too... or he simply abandonned them.

For the most part, Brandon rather wrote by either showing everything (way more scenes than Jordan would have used), or pulling rabbits out of his hat when he needed. We would have a whole book without any mention of the AHs, until after the fact we get a brief POV giving us the final solution...
That resulted in very weird paradoxes... for instance the resolution of all the AS political plotlines ongoing since LOC have happened in a book in which the Aes Sedai side characters have largely been 100% evacuated, reduced to playing virtually no role at all! Some people what felt wrong about the BT storyline... well, that's simple: there's now way Egwene, Siuan, Lelaine, Romanda would have gone on so long without mentionning the fate of their envoys or wondering how things were going there.

And yes, this is a failure on Brandon's part. His work reads like a Jordan draft, and much of what Jordan himself has written was left in draft form too (most of Egwene's TGS scenes were worked on by RJ, but they still don't feel like his usual Egwene scenes but like work-in-progress that Brandon didn't polish enough). Jordan got the key points down first, often raw dialogue, then he reworked the scenes up to 15 times before even showing them to Harriet... It's pretty obvious he added secondary events later when the book had taken shape a lot more, eg: OK, Egwene's arc is all developped, I would need a clue about Sheriam so she'll be mentionned there, and for the BT Siuan is going to mention it here, and Egwene is going to mention her frustration the envoys have nothing to report but that they're outside and Taim is repeating they must wait there. In short, Jordan polished things up.

Brandon's version feels like he've rushed through everything, also like his solution to everything was the easy one of "let's add one more scene to explain this, or show that". Rather than flesh out Rand's or Min's scenes with throaway mentions of Aviendha's weird behaviour, we got a full Aviendha arc. And Gawyn too got a full arc when he hardly needed it. That's how he ended up with AMOL split in three books with a ton of extraenous scenes and useless episodes to tell the same story, while weirdly diminishing its scope. Another aspect that show rushing and not much else is how he resorted so often to creating background characters (usually with unlikely names) rather than bothering to make a bit of research to find the right existing one Jordan might have used and that would have added a little detail and make the whole thing more sympathetic to long time readers. So we've got "generic warder 1" and "random Aes Sedai 25" and "Asha'man 49" being used in a single scene and be thrown away after use. Meanwhile, the seconday AS cast appears to have been reduced to the Mistress of Novices, Lelaine and Romanda - as if Romanda and Nynaeve were the only two Yellows Brandon could keep track of... It's nearly the same in every storyline... instead of using familiar figures of EF with Perrin, we got random sentries because Brandon rushed and couldn't be bothered, after he drafted a scene with "random sentry 1" to go take a look at EWOT to track down an existing tertiary character about whom it might have been cool to play with for an encounter with Rand.

It makes me laugh a lot when I see people saluting the "fact" with Brandon things are finally moving. It's highly ironic considering he's needed three large book where Jordan planned one very large book to tell the same story... with obviously a ton less episodes... Perrin's and Mat's storylines in TOM were bloated massively, Rand's and Egwene's in TGS were less so, but still bloated... mostly because Brandon failed to use multi-purpose scenes and ellipses like Jordan did, and insisted to show on screen every little development. We can't learn Rand has visited Itulrade in Saldaea, we have to see it. We can't learn stuff seems to be happening with Aviendha, wonder about it until we finally get a POV when she goes to Rhuidean, we had to see her every step of the way, essentially repeating herself in all her POVs. Etc. Paradoxically, he didn't find any room for all the side elements that went by the wayside. Brandon ironically bloated the telling of the finale and it's because he rushed through it all. He told all the individual stories, he didn't do the extra work required to turn it all into a proper novel. It's astounding when you look deeper at the two books how many scenes he showed should have been handled by mentions in other chapters only, or alluded to. That includes most of Gawyn's storyline, for instance, and Lan's, and Aviendha's, Cadsuane's and so on. All the Perrin/Mat scenes in TGS were useless, written to be "prequels" and there solely to put the characters in the book.