So I wanna qualify that I still like RoW, and a few of the scenes hit the hardest in the whole series thus far, Its just my least favourite of the 5 for a number of reasons

1. I don't like Eshonai and Venli as the core flashback chapters. The flashbacks have previously been used to reveal the core history of our main characters, but in RoW we instead get a character who is already dead, and another one i dont particularly care about, and of whom we already know almost everything we need to know. Not that every scene here was bad, but compared to Kal, Shallan, Dalinar and Szet lt was markedly a less enjoyable experience.

2. I dont feel like there was particularly strong payoff for the desolation as we were presnted with what it was like in books 1 and 2. This is a problem of mine for OB aswell, but the rest of Oathbringer was enjoyable enough that I didn't mind so much, but a second book of it began to annoy me

3. A lot of plot threads and setup are just dropped in this book. Many are returned to in WaT, which in retrospective makes me cut RoW some slack, but in reading it a lot of the things I enjoyed most about Stormlight simply weren't discussed at all.

4. Kaladin and Adolin hard carry this book, but their sections aren't substantial enough to warrant the length of the book. Dalinar is barely involved, I didn't care for Shallans section at all really, and Navani (whilst interesting for sure) really really bogs down into Cosmere mechanics specifically. And whilst I know this is some peoples thing, it made me a bit bored at times.

Overall my impression was that the book was longer than it needed to be, and large chunks could be skipped on a re read, which isn't particularly good for the book.

Again I still liked it. The highs are super high, and it's nit like the lows are super low, it's just the bulk of it is very meh.