Actually, at the time, I thought of LoC the way you think of WH below (absent the factor of disappointing books prior - I'd call tSR & tFoH the high point). Somewhat of a letdown, with an awesome ending scene (way better than WH's ending for my money - WH's high note is all about what the accomplishment represents than anything about the Cleansing in particular).
That stuff, though, was some of Rand's best in the series. The whole Altaran campaign was, I thought, Rand's best plot in the latter half of the series.
See, I enjoyed a lot of the other stuff enough that when Rand set out to begin the Cleansing, I was like "Oh, right. He said he was going to do that." I was more interested in the outcome of that event than the process. I really like Mat's & Elayne's stories in Winter's Heart.
I don't actually think it was bad. I might have been disappointed in the overall advancement of the story, but there was a lot of good stuff in there. Mat & Perrin could have moved further along their tracks, but OTOH, he did need to slow down to make some progress with Tuon and RJ really did blunder by linking up the timeline of three different PoVs. Largely, I think, because it doesn't mean very much to Mat or Perrin. We should have seen the effect among the two contending Aes Sedai factions who don't have Elayne throwing cold water on their panic and in the Black Tower. Elayne's plot in the book ends right before she might have been in a position to look into the latter and Egwene's comes up after the reaction is over and done. It would have been at least more interesting than Mat or Perrin blowing off their Aes Sedai companions. And it was in Egwene's plot that the Cleansing was best served, because we had jumped ahead, to where the sisters have found out what they can, and are now truly acting based on their mistaken beliefs. It was a consequential response to the Cleansing and the first, and maybe only, such we see and it worked perfectly with one of the major themes of WoT, regarding mistaken belief and reactions to it.
Your buddy sucks.
It was a character book, not a plot one. But, yeah, it was a set up book, carrying on all the arcs that started in WH and concluded in KoD. The siege of Caemlyn, the attack on the White Tower, Mat's relationship with Tuon and Perrin vs Shaido.
At least I can spell all the words in that sentence.
It's details, and the details are what hooked you to get in this far. There're no fewer or more details in CoT than any other book. Considerably fewer, I am sure, because it's shorter, than tSR or tFoH.
So you admit your memory is the real problem here.
Oh, wow. Five things that aren't true or didn't happen.
Why does anyone bother if they don't like Nynaeve? They have no soul.

This is why everyone hated it - because it WAS cliffhangers! Perrin and Rand were about to sit down with who we thought were the penultimate bad guys, the guys chasing Mat, and whom the other half the main characters could never accept as friends. Egwene had just been captured. The stakes were ramped up for the Black Ajah conflict in the Tower and the Black Tower conflict and Ituralde's campaign both began. How do you miss all this stuff?

I don't see how he ever appreciated it, since apparently it was full of nothing but random things taking place which came out of nowhere.