I'm glad it didn't happen, but for a group of people so vastly different than everyone else, with practically god-like powers (which many had been forgotten since AoL, but still, compared to a normal human, it's a totally different playing field) I just could see it happening, on a larger scale than it did. Yeah, channelers controlled their groups of people, but I was thinking mass take overs or malevolent rulers. Does that say a lot about what I think of people who have power? Probably.
More or less what happened with Shara. But like I said, a lone ruler wouldn't be able to pull it off on their own. There wouldn't be anything to set them apart from the thousands of other channelers. Only way would work on scale larger then some tribe in the Land of Madmen is if they just so happened to luck into an extremely powerful sa'angreal... And following that up with somehow never going to sleep again would likely help a ton...
Otherwise... Likely the only ones who could, maybe, pull off something like that would be the Dragon Blooded, and even they would need to watch their back like a hawk.
Yeah I can see that, and I assume the Creator did make Rand body swap, or at least help, but still, it was very shocking to me. I suppose I should look at it as his way of helping, because he never seemed to do anything else to help. With the Dark One having such a huge presence, talking to people, having so many active legions, I was annoyed that the Creator didn't do...something! But, I wil try to look at saving Rand as his 'something'
But the One Power would seem to come from the Creator, and thus... The Creator does do a ton in the books. He lets them do as they will with his power. For whatever they will.
Beyond that though. When Rand sealed the Dark One, he wove the OP and TP together as one power... Now THAT has some interesting implications.