He was pretty much just stuck with the story as Jordon intended/wrote into the ground. I enjoyed Sanderson's Mistborn books, and I don't think his work with WoT was good even by his own standards, but speaking realistically, it must be incredibly hard to gain familiarity with a multitude of characters that you haven't lived and breathed for decades. Only Jordan was capable of keeping them all straight in his head, and even he ended up juggling too many balls, as many of the later books show.

And while some of what you say has merit, and you're certainly entitled to your opinion, I think you're giving far too much credit to Jordon and too little to Sanderson. Particularly, I don't think WoT ever had great or deep characters. They were always fairly one or two-dimensional at best, with most characterized by the amount of sniffing, braid pulling, skirt smoothing, or confused-about-women moments they each had. Sanderson made them even worse, that's definitely true, but if he's a candle then Jordon is certainly no sun.

EDIT:

I dunno if I'd recommend WoT to someone that hadn't already started it. It's enjoyable, but not that enjoyable, there are plenty of other things to read that are much better. The only reason I'm on this site and care about WoT to the extent that I do is because I started it so early, and reread it so many times while growing up that it basically became a part of me. So maybe to someone that was 11-13, and even then the little punks had better read the entire thing, because you shouldn't start something just to dump it halfway.

And I'll remember WoT in 15 years, probably. The bare outline of it at least, but WoT is one of the easiest things to do it for. I'll remember that there was a Rand, Mat, Perrin, wondergirls, Aes Sedai, etc, and have a dim recollection of how their adventures made me feel. Much simpler to recall that than all the exact machinations of the characters in a series like Song of Ice and Fire, or Malazan, or something else in the epic fantasy genre but with the addition of complexity.