But rather that they made a decision to worry less about chronological integrity in the interest of resolving at least some important story arcs in each book.

I don't think my argument about them agreeing with the WoT bashers is necessarily weird. Lets assume that for arguments sake that 90% of loyal WoT fans were extremely turned off by what happened in books 7-10 (with CoT being the low point). Lets say that the outrage among those who had helped support the series for more than a decade hit fever pitch with CoT and RJ understood that perhaps he had stubbornly turned off an enormous chunk of those who loved and supported him for many years by insisting on moving the story so little over the span of 6 years. If this is the case then I don't think it would be weird for Brandon and Harriet to acknowlege that it might be better to not produce a book that most previously loyal readers would greatly dislike, even if there was a small percentage of readers that didn't mind it at all.

Of course we don't know what the actual numbers are, but among readers that are not rabid enough to post on a message board I suspect much more than half were extremely turned off by what RJ allowed to happen in the second half of the series. Obviously I could be way off. My limited sampling pool of friends who read the series and became highly frustrated by the later books may be unrepresentative.

If RJ later acknowleged to Harriet that he perhaps should have done the later books a little differently (pure speculation on my part), then it wouldn't seem totally odd to me for Harriet and Brandon to decide to avoid what turned off so many loyal readers. It would seem at least as odd to me if they opted not to do such a thing just because there was a small percentage of extra loyal readers that liked how things went in the later books.

Even if my point is somewhat valid (it is just a guess on my part), it still doesn't address your point that they could have made the chronological split while still avoiding violation of RJ's customs regarding insertion of minor character view points only in the proper chronological spots. I am sure Brandon simply screwed some things up. But like you said, ToM could turn out to be much better stylisticaly than the prologue forebodes. Here is to hoping.