I don't necessarily agree with your reasons, but your apparent assertion that Rand was not evil or psychotic because of the Graendal incident is true.

The assertion that the people whom Graendal had brain-wiped don't count as living people or that killing them does not count as murder is a dangerous step well past the beginning of a slippery slope. Even if they were fully conscious and intelligent, with their free will intact and were mere dupes confused by mundane deception, killing them would STILL have been morally acceptable. Graendal was a valid target and collateral damage is the price you need to pay sometimes. Rand did not send those people into Graendal's place, so it is not his fault if they die. Any efforts made to preserve their lives would have unnecessarily endangered both the lives of people attacking Graendal, and the cause of stopping her in the first place. She was a legitimate target, and if Rand could have zapped her with as much certainty without killing those people, he certainly would have. How many Illianer soldiers who now fight for him saw their comrades and friends killed by Rand's people when he invaded Illian, merely for the "crime" of defending their nation from its ancient enemies, and the Aiel who are foes of all civilization (by THEIR reckonning). Far from being inert meat puppets, those men were doing a thing that would considered good, noble and even heroic, if not for the purely coincidental personal crimes of a member of their government, about which most of them would have no way of knowing. No one has ever dared contend that Rand is evil or psycho for initiating the conflict that caused their deaths. It's war and crap happens.

Part of the evil of starting a war is that in doing so, one causes the circumstances where things like this can happen. You create a situation where horrible things can be done by good people and for good & justified reasons. Rand is not to blame, because he didn't start this conflict.

As for the assertion that using balefire is somehow evil because of the risk to the Pattern, that is also absurd. First of all, the risk WOULD logically be negligible. If entire cities in the AoL were wiped out and the Pattern survived, the population of Graendal's stronghold is insignificant by comparison. Rand would have killed a few hundred people, and little more than 1,000 at most. Cities in an advanced technical society like the AoL would have been as populous as modern cities or more, with hundreds of thousands, or millions or even tens of millions of people. There were hundreds and thousands of channelers "freely" using balefire. The occasional blast to take out a Forsaken would not come close. Even if a single thread burned out runs the risk of undoing the Pattern, it is a risk worth taking. If anyone is likely to beat the odds and have reality survive, it is the most powerful known ta'veren.

The odds against the forces of the Light are far too long and the scales are stacked too heavily in the Dark One's favor for the Light to refrain from all risks. The cause of the Light is doomed if Rand dies, so logically, the safest move would be to lock him away from all harm until Tarmon Gaidon came. Yet anyone who suggests or tries this is portrayed as wrong in the series. Just as Rand has to risk his life, and by extension, the world & the Light, in order to accomplish what he must in order to win, so too must he risk the world and the Pattern to make it possible to preserve them from the Dark One.

No matter what anyone says, Rand never went bad. He had his perspective flawed and warped by extremely harsh experiences, but he always was careful not to kill anyone who did not have it comeing or could be avoided. Aside from losing his temper at Tam, every death he even contemplated, much less caused, at the very nadir of his personal crisis, was still justifiable and a legitimate target. Might there have been MORE moral means than his planned attacks on the Seanchan or the Borderlanders? Of course. But none of what he sought to do with the Choedan Kal was actually wrong or even unwarranted, and a good cause can be made for the practicality of his wishes (most other means would entail greater personal risks to the indispensible man himself).