You're perfectly right that WoT is massive, and minus at least characters at the level of Egianin, Domon, etc. a lot is lost. That alone recommends animation.
But I also feel there a lot of visual distinction in WoT that will be completely lost in live action. GoT needed a few grand castles, and the rest is fairly standard city/road. But WoT, if you want to give a sense of a different world that is the crumbling remain of a massively technically skilled past, requires entire cities that are distinctive, beautiful, and otherworldly. A lot of the charm of WoT lies in that too. And animation is way more suited to achieving that.
Frankly, Amazon or Netflix deciding to come up with an animated Epic drama is the only way we get a good WoT adaptation.
I agree on production design. Animation would provide a much better value and freedom to do things right, considering that it's pretty out of question a WOT series would get made with the budget of blockbusters like LOTR or even Game of Thrones. And it solves all the casting problems.
The technology is there to pull off the WOT world perfectly as live action (though I bet many people would bitch about how it looks the same way they bitched about the look of the SW prequels), but for all its success WOT is pure Fantasy and as such wouldn't have a mass appeal beyond Fantasy fans. There is a large audience for this, but scattered worldwide. An animated series for adults would probably make its money with the Japanese market alone (even if it's done in a western style of animation), but the format has some success in the US too as a niche market, and it's even more popular in France (just like manga are in France, the biggest buyer after Asia).
Unless I'm mistaken, Netflix is already producing/financing animated series. They're probably the best choice at this point for this kind of project, though things will evolved very fast in the coming years, and I suspect there won't be a shortage before long of web-only broadcasters, with a worldwide reach, who could be interested in a project like that, which would secure them viewers for several years.
