I may be remembering wrong, but I'm pretty sure you said her death would be redemptive, after she is completely humiliated and cut down to size. What happened was pretty far from that.
Same with the Seals. As far as Merrilor goes, she did prevent Rand from breaking the Seals. She was given complete responsibility for them, and the decision on when to break them was hers to make. And as she stated quite clearly, she would only break them if she decided they needed to be broken at all. As such, Rand entered Shayol Ghul without the Seals broken, which was quite contrary to his plan.
Now, I'd be the first the agree that Sanderson botched the execution of Egwene realizing that the Seals had to be broken and connecting the dots between her dream and her research from the Tower's archives. We got a stupid throwaway line that was easy to miss in the midst of all the battle-porn we were subjected to. That doesn't change the fact that your prediction that Egwene would be forced to give on the Seals issue was spectacularly wrong.