And I don't know if any other author is quite as repetitive, both in terms of endlessly rehashing the objectivist preaching and in terms of summarizing the plot of earlier books in every single book for those readers who suffer from acute amnesia (or didn't bother with the earlier books).

I think the preaching and repetitiveness keeps people from noticing (or remembering) some of the strengths that he does have as a writer - Wizard's First Rule was, as you noted, actually quite good as an epic fantasy novel, and had some good ideas (though also some horrible clichés), while Faith of the Fallen has a superb opening line and some really rather impressive propagandistic writing (unfortunately it also has an atrocious ending).

Yup. Those bad guys who start out with some appearance of roundedness either end up becoming good guys (Cara, Nicci) or turn out to be utterly evil after all. I'll give him points for Denna, but that's about the only one.

Debt of Bones was readable, as I recall, largely because it was merely novella length, but it has been a very long time since I read it. I do have to quibble with "sucking from 6-8" - I've long argued that book six is in some ways the most notable book of the series and, apart from the ending as I mentioned above, arguably the best, or second best after Wizard's First Rule. It certainly doesn't approach the level of the terrible books 7 and 8. The politics are very much present, but in the form of an unsubtle propagandistic narrative, not in the form of direct preaching like in most later books.

Yeah, you're very right about the editor... any halfway decent editor who could afford not to be a doormat would've excised tens if not hundreds of pages from most Sword of Truth novels, especially the later ones.

If you have to boil it down to just one thing, I would say it has to be that he not only writes about horrible mass murders and other atrocities, but has his hero condone or even perpetrate/order them in some cases, and makes abundantly clear that he supports his hero in that.

Even in Wizard's First Rule (iirc, I may be off on some details), there's some princess of 10 or so years old who is horrible to her inferiors and delights in being cruel to Richard during his captivity with Denna; he ends up violently assaulting and I think killing her, with the apparent approval of the author. That alone was enough for a lot of readers, and later occasions where Richard condemns entire cities or countries to death merely sealed it.