In that book of essays, he has a humorous bit about how to tell if a work is pornographic. If every single step along the way is detailed in laborious fashion, it may be pornographic. The level of detail in the WoT series approaches that level of graphicness. I'm not certain that the scope is any more "exceptional" than a compact, complex work such as Wolfe's "Solar Cycle," which ended up being 12 books, none of which were over 400 pages (and most under 300). It seems, again based on imperfect recall, that WoT is a much simpler story at heart than works like Wolfe's, but that it's been expanded well into the hundreds per volume just to have the quests last longer than most writers would find necessary for their works to flow well together. When whole volumes are little more than middles in which there are few to no mini-resolutions occurring, then wouldn't it be fair to note that instead of "exceptional scope," this series may just have suffered a bit of logorrhea?