From people who are less in the know. Rand says, while he has an angreal in his pocket and a real need to make a Gateway as large as he can to quickly transport as many Aiel as he can, that he can't make a Gateway larger than 4x4 no matter what. This is also a time when he doesn't have all his eventual strength, yet even much later he doesn't make Gateways any larger.

I called it moronic long ago, and continue to do so. There was plenty of evidence that Gateway size doesn't strictly track with strength, including Aviendha's quote from tPoD. I don't remember whether it was you or Shannow, but someone once actually had a theory that we can take Gateway areas of various characters, and from that map their strength. I think Rand's 4x4 gateway was compared to Beonin's 2x2, and it was concluded that this meant Beonin was 1/4th Rand's strength. What is that BUT moronic? It was to those theories I was referring to.

No one contradicted him because there was a more immediate issue at play: Rand was at the brink of overdrawing Saidin. The only man with enough knowledge to say different was focussed on not dying...

Not sure how much credence we can place on Brandon's work, so huge grain of salt and all that, but as of aMoL, this isn't true. Androl makes much larger ones on his own.

Problem is, we don't know they were making the largest they could. Rand doesn't always make a 4x4 gateway, only when he needs the largest he can make.

But not to compare strength. That's the point. To an extent, you can add more OP and make a Gateway larger. But you hit an upper limit, eventually. The question is: is that upper limit set by your potential? Several quotes directly state otherwise.

Sure, except we see Rand verify that. And from Aviendha we know that where Elayne can make her largest Gateway using less than the total amount of OP she can draw, Aviendha cannot because of her block.

Both these verifiable events strongly reinforce Asmodean's claim.

No, I think that is wrong. Here's how I see it:

1) The size your Gateway will take is defined by the strength of your Talent.
2) For average Talent, a minimum of level 19 strength is needed to be able to make a functioning Gateway large enough for a person to walk through. Even if you're stronger in the OP, you can't use less strength and make a huge Gateway, since your Talent is the same.
3) Since your level of Talent remains the same, if you're growing in strength, up to a point you might increase Gateway size.

I say the last because whatever level of Talent Rand had, his Gateway sizes didn't change between Book 5 and Book 11, though we have some hints to his strength increasing. For Aviendha, the second learned weave limitation seems to have held her back even as her strength grew.

I'm fairly certain this is the way of it. For whatever its worth, this also matches what Brandon did with Androl.

Doesn't make much sense. What allows someone to regulate Gateway size, then? We've seen Nynaeve, for instance, make two Gateways of different sizes in immediate succession. If size was passively determined by her potential, what did she do? Trick the Gateway-size gods into thinking her potential was lower?

He definitely defies the trend in that his level of Talent is incredibly high. But I dislike theories that aren't parsimonious. The simplest solution is that Androl's Talent is so high he doesn't need much of the OP to make a Gateway. Rather than seeing this as something out of the blue, its best to treat him as part of the trend, just an extreme outlier.

If you think two people of the exact same OP strength can make equal sized Gateways, I'd ask you to prove it. We have Aviendha and Androl to prove otherwise, and nothing at all to prove it is true.

I'm not saying what I want. I'm saying what is in the books, which is that Gateway size isn't strictly dependent on the amount of OP you put into it.

Egwene (and Rand) aren't our only examples though.

I don't know where you get the 14 weaker ones comment. Because he can make 14 flows? I suspect it won't work that easily. I think Rand will certainly be able to make 14 shields that are strong enough to cut off 14 Daigians. With his angreal, we see that he can make 7 that are strong enough (in his mind, this is always subject to his lack of knowledge of Aes Sedai strength though) to shield 7 fairly strong women. But LTT is still doubtful. I think that is because shielding is a very tricky thing. You can have a shield strong enough, but it can bounce back in some cases. You need focus, and precision, to land a shield. When facing one, or two, maybe even 3, it is possible to do it so that there's a high probability all the shields land. But it seems that even at 7, LTT thinks the risk is high that some of those shields won't land, leaving open the possibility of a counterattack, and the ensuing chaos.

This, at least, has always been my interpretation of that scene.

Yup. Some skills and abilities have what are called "Critical periods". The literature on this is quite extensive.

This is clearly LTT's knowledge leaking through, though. A few days later he destroys every Trolloc in the Stone with one weave. And we see that Asmodean is never able to teach him how to shield. But he gets it later anyway.

I think it is simply a matter of practice, as the Companion says. We KNOW Egwene to be the type who pushes her abilities to the max. Already by tSR, she could do 4 things at once. What's more, the time she was doing this practice coincides with the time she and the Wise Ones were training Aviendha in the Waste. It seems clear to me this is why Aviendha does better than Elayne. Nynaeve was always using a lot of flows with Healing. Elayne is the last one out, and it seems she simply had less practice at her earliest training times.

Yup.

Possibly not, but that wasn't my point.

Yup. And if the person you're shielding is of the opposite gender, then you need to be stronger, though we don't know by how much.

Yes. We see that in New Spring, Moiraine believes it is extraordinary she could do 4 things at once in her AS test. She thought 3 was her limit.

Definitely, but I don't think just increasing the power of the shield is enough. If you read the scene where Nynaeve and Talaan are dueling, your focus matters. So your focus on the shield, and your focus on holding on to the source. Get distracted even a little, and you can be shielded/accidentally shield instead of stilling/fail to land your shield.

We've seen all those things happen to Nynaeve at various times.