It's a fictional story about a place that never existed where people use magic. RJ didn't have to give us the 'rules' that he did about how his system works, but I suppose it was important to him to sketch a general outline for folks. Now people want to test his work against rigorous rules of scientific and logical reasoning? As if it HAS to make perfect sense or something to be any good?

I think what he gave us is plenty enough of explanation. Society was fragmented, channelers even more so. There was literally a THOUSAND years of everybody doing anything they could to survive until the next day! It didn't leave a lot of time for school. I find it completely believable that all sorts of knowledge would be lost during that time.

There is virtually nothing left from the Age of Legends, nothing. No books, no machines, no government. Only scraps and bits of information were ever found. Oral history was the only means of passing information on to later generations, and that was sketchy at best as we've seen. Not a single book was ever found in its entirety, only pieces of manuscripts and parts of pages. Even if there were entire libraries filled with nothing but books about the Power and various weaves, none would have survived any better than any other library. And considering that we've been given glimpses of the AoL which show that books were probably stored in some way similar to what we would call 'electronically' (re: Ebou Dar ter'angreal cache), the mechanism to reach this information would be lost.

I have no problem with this aspect of the story at all. It wouldn't have been the same story otherwise, and I'm very happy with it the way it is now.