I enjoy the OP debate as much as anyone here, but I have never believed RJ mapped OP strength or angreal in absolute terms. He left that to his characters and seems to have deliberately avoided speaking in absolutes. He rather seemed to judge things on a couple of loose scales.

1. The 21 level list which determines deference and little else ... From what I can tell he may have had to retrofit the scale to go beyond just AS as he began incorporating new Stronger/weaker women into the series. Meaning at one point there were 21 levels between Moiraine and Daigian and later that list got shifted around to incorporate the wider spread of Lanfear and Morgase. The more I consider this list the less useful it seems outside of Aes Sedai. There is absolutely no way we can apply a scale to each level with any accuracy ... I believe RJ did that deliberately as well ... It left him enough room to let Verin perform an OP task he needed her to do, but still be weaker enough than Moiraine that she clearly needed to defer.

2. RJ seems to have decided how strong individuals are in a basics manner such as "are they strong enough to do X task" and used Talent and Flow Affinity to mitigate any variance ... The Kins woman who can shield Nynaeve, Androl and his Gateways and Naeff with his affinity for Air etc ... Thus we have women like Aviendha who can create a massive water spout that "only Cadsuane could have matched" or the strength assessment from early on regarding the necessary strength to use the Choedan Kal.

In this way RJ would never have made a mistake that couldn't easily have been explained and he could easily speak to a channelers basic abilities with ease. When he did say something that seemed contradictory to a scene in the books all he had to say was "Talents or Flow affinity" and we have a viable answer rooted in his system. Unfortunately for Bsand he isn't the creator of the system and must rely much more heavily on the text and notes which we all now is impossible to memorize. Where Bsand goes wrong is that he is trying to directly answer questions that RJ would have put an Aes Sedai like spin on.

RJ even let the books subtlety show us where the main characters where in their growth by showing them perform tasks of increasing complexity and strength as we progressed. At one stage Elayne and Egwene are awed by Nynaeve's Healing weaves, but later in the series they are whipping up even more complex weaves without a second thought. There is a point when we can see that Egwene is significantly ahead of Elayne as she can lift and shield several women several paces into the air without massive strain, but at a similar time Elayne is surprised that she can even lift a single woman (Amathera) and comments that she has grown in Strength. Later still we see Elayne lifting cauldrons and such with ease demonstrating further Strength development. However, we see little growth from Nynaeve in these times, showing how close she already was to her Potential ... While clearly still growing she has not shown a significant increase since she faced down Moghedien in TSR ... She could have been 90% to potential by then for all we know and thus would not have noticed the relatively small gains in Strength she was having.

All that said, Brandon seems to be making some effort to conform to fan questions rather than stick to the vague answers RJ handed out which allowed him freedom to alter things without creating huge problems in the series.