I fully agree the linguistic aspect in WOT is absurd and one of the worst elements of the world building. Over here we were cut from regular contact with French culture for less than two hundred years (from the conquest to around the time of the invention of radio) and just in that time, the French revolution had been enough to send the language in a new direction, to the point the average Canadien and the average Français could understand each other with much difficulty around 1910, except for clerics, priests, seminarists and a few decades later, media people (and the older people in Normandy, as tons of turns of phrase, regionalisms and the accent come from their patois that hasn't changed much since the 18th century). That the Seanchan could impose their language, fine, but that their language et the Westlands' have evolved exactly the same way over a millenium is lunacy. I wouldn't have minded so much had Jordan simply admit it was contrived so he could avoid having interprets in relationships such as Tuon/Mat, but to try to defend the logic of it was stubborn nonsense from a man who hated he cheated when he cheated.

That said, you have to admit the linguistic elements play a very minor role in WOT's world building, barely any at all in comparison to the place of languages in Tolkien.

I think RJ's best element of world building remains the One Power. It was fairly innovative and original when WOT began, a "magic system" as you could find in early RPGs, but originating in a science that had devolved into something no longer fully understood as such, more like a craft, is also quite interesting, even more because RJ chose to depart from the cliché of spells. That this magic power, the substance of God (presumably), served to mirror or echo most of the themes of the story is also interesting.

That Jordan chose to develop plots that respected the basic cosmology that reality is made of patterns within patterns is another interesting element.

It's a matter of tastes in the end, but personally I've had far more problems, especially in the early series, with mechanistic way RJ created "cultures" by merging existing ones purely on whims, and disregarding anthropology or sociology. The Cairhienin remains for me the most abysmal example, in TGH most of all.

As for storytelling, I personally prefer the pace and focus of the mid to late series (the first WOT book I actually liked was TSR, in the late series only TPOD really bugs me). There's dividing line on this issue is most often between those who read WOT for entertaiment, and those for who discussing and theorizing had become a hobby they enjoyed.

I don't enjoy so much the early books, as to me the first three are clearly one of the slowest introduction to a Fantasy series, period. RJ's original plan was to introduce the series with a novel that went from Rand leaving the TR, having received his father's sword, to Rand getting the sword that proclaimed him as LTT's rebirth.

Instead of sticking to that, a good plan, RJ gave us three "iterations" of the Ishamael/Rand confrontation.

TGH in particular (to my tastes, the worst WOT book by a long shot) accomplished extremely little for a book so large, it's an overstretched chase sequence, inverting the roles of hunter and prey from EOTW.