The WOT was a dead series after books 8-11, especially 10. BS brought a new life to the series and did what RJ seemed incapable of.....bringing in the WOT plane to a safe landing.
RJ never stopped digging. I know he was working on AMOL and perhaps we would have ending in the same place, but I doubt the journey would have been as good.
The series was definitely dead at CoT. Jordan is fantastic at world building but his writing left a lot to be desired.
I always found Jordan's extreme-over-the-top flowerly descriptive writing style very very tedious; many middle books I could scarcely keep reading that tripe, I only kept reading to find out what would happen. Really admired the world-building though.
Brandon, on the other hand, is great at writing war and action scenes, and he played to his strengths in the final books. I think he did as well as it was humanly possible to do to save the series.
Not a classic series, should have been done in 7 books, but came out OK in the end.
