When I think of "florid description" I actually think of E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, one of the first "modern" fantasy novels ever written. If you don't know him (and a lot of people don't), he predates Tolkien's work by a few years. He spent a LOT of time on excessive description.

Nabokov is not florid in his descriptions. He just writes well. The words flow. You could read the book aloud and people would listen just to hear how things were said.

To more broadly address your two-part response, I am not saying that Jordan doesn't tell a good story. For you, it's the way the story develops, for others it may be the content of the story itself.

Being a "good writer", however, usually deals with how a book is written from a compositional standpoint. Does the author repeat phrases? Does he have awkward sentences? Is he directly describing people or taking too much time on stale descriptions? In Jordan's case, he is awful. People read him despite his writing style, not because of it.

His STORYTELLING style, however, has caught people and kept them reading (or rather, as we seem to agree, he did for the first six books). A storytelling style is different from a writing style. I specifically mentioned Dan Brown to make that distinction. Even people who aren't very sophisticated in their approach to books can take the time to gag at Brown's descriptions, the repetitive nature of his prose, the repetitive nature of his prose and the awful adjectives. On the other hand, people tend to ignore that for the stories, which are fast-paced and entertaining. His storytelling style is fantastic, but Brown's writing style is worse than that of many high school students.

I'm not saying that storytelling skill isn't important. I was just answering your question, namely, "Why do people say Jordan wasn't a good writer?" It also explains why some of those same people read him anyway.

PS - For the record, Nabokov wrote Lolita in English, even though he personally translated it into Russian later on.