I'm just also not one of the morons who voted for WoT as the best fantasy series ever on the Quickpoll.

Of course Brown doesn't develop his characters as much - he writes essentially stand-alone thrillers. To my mind, that makes Jordan's failure as a writer even more egregious. He had the opportunity and he certainly took the time. He meandered his way through five books (7-11) with actual action that could have been condensed to one if they were as tightly written as books 1-6.

My point isn't that Brown is great. It's that virtually everything that people accuse him of can be found in the other writers that the critics like. Period.