The Dark One is the only real antagonist for Rand. The Forsaken are down there with the Trollocs. That has been the explicit set-up from day one. Since the beginning, it has been "The Dragon Reborn is needed/has been reborn to face the Dark One." Not "We need the Dragon to face the Forsaken." RJ himself has done everything short of breaking the fourth wall in the books to make them seem lame and pathetic, and why? Because they ARE! These are the people who were malcontented and unsuccessful in a utopia where all human needs were met, and humanity reached their highest levels of material prosperity and intellectual development. Short of actual paradise, this was the high point in the history of the world and they still weren't happy. Sanderson finally came right out and had an expository dialogue explicitly compare them to children squabbling for daddy's attention, and selfishness as their common denominator and primary qualification! These are petty, spoiled whiners with entitlement complexes and low self-esteem. Why the hell are people STILL expecting big things from them?

The major threat in this work is the all-consuming evil that wants to make the protagonist his bitch. Dark Rand has been buiulding up for a while now and the dangers of his emergence have been foreshadowed for a long time as well. Does it REALLY take him snarling and strutting about like a villain to make that concept come through to you? Just as well, because the next step would have had to be Sanderson & Harriet coming over to your house and screaming in your face "IT IS ALL ABOUT THE GOOD GUYS STAYING GOOD AND REJECTING EVIL."

Needless to say (though I'm beginning to see I can't use that phrase for granted), this is also why RJ doesn't kill his characters - the battleground is in their hearts and minds, NOT trading weaves of the Power or marching soldiers around. The important thing when Mat commands troops in battle is not what he does with his forces, but how it affects him. When Nynaeve broke her block, the importance was not how much more available the Power was to her, but the mental step she had to take in order to do that. That's why she moved to the back-burner for a while. Even though she was involved with important things, the only PoV she had between breaking her block and sending Lan to the Borderlands involved minor scenes in WH to explain why she switched groups and why she didn't give the OP-junkie-readers a cheap thrill by rescuing Rand & Lan herself. The important things weren't the fights or wonder-weaves she was involved with, it was how those events affected the characters involved, and those had little to do with Nynaeve's development, hence her lack of a PoV.

This applies to ALL the important characters and to the story at large. THERE IS NO VILLAIN. Evil can only really triumph by the good guys failing. Evil is not a real thing, it is like cold or darkness, it's the absence of something. Goodness, in this case. The protagonists are the playing field and the prize, and have to fail to let evil win. The series doesn't need any villains, just bad examples. Think the Forsaken are lame and pathetic? That's what's going to become of the characters we are made to like and identify with if they fall or fail. Dark Rand was a few steps away from that. He was not cool, he was a scared, whiny little baby scrunching his eyes shut and plugging his fingers into his ears to avoid unpleasantness. He didn't even go all that "dark" since he didn't really do anything bad. Ooo! He lost his temper with his father when the man confessed to coming at the behest of his enemy. Knocking a loved one on his or her ass might be the nadir of a character arc on the Lifetime TV network, but it hardly counts as real evil.

If some readers don't wrap their heads around the themes and point of the story fast, they are going to be mighty disappointed a year or two from now by aMoL.