Numuhuku

It's also worth considering that Pewter gives a fixed physical boost that's actually independent of your own physical capabilities. A bigger/brawnier pewter thug doesn't get a bigger magical strength boost, just his mundane strength added to that. It's why Vin being small allowed her to jump so disproportionately higher than a pewter thug with a foot or two on her (frankly Vin could probably casually out hop Singer War Form's while on pewter). Which is a big difference compared to Stormlight "merely" allowing the body to run at 100% of its theoretical limit for an extended period of time. Course the healing is really the biggest deal. Stormlight by itself automatically makes someone something between a regular Bloodmaker and a compounded one. That'd be worth it even without all the other physical boosts. Much less the various surges Surgebinders possess.

Well remember in Venlis flashback that

The Listener's behavior was influenced by the combination of years of war with the humans driving them to desperation, and the fact that while in stormform (a regal form) they were subjected to Odium's influence even at the cost of their own self-interest or self-preservation. It's also worth noting that the Listener's had a very partial understanding of their gods, since they only had the old songs to work off of. They didn't know what the fused were specifically or how they functioned in Odium's hierarchy. And that as RoW illustrates, even Venli and her inner circle were rather in the dark about what summoning the everstorm would actually curtail.

I don't think it's too tricky to figure out what happened. We know that most of the Human's in the Roshan system fled their original home world after surgebinding left most of the planet wrecked. I think the Shattered plains were simply a micro example of what occurred on ashyn. High level surge binding transformed into weapons of mass destruction. What terrified the old Knights Radiant order into the recreance in order to abandon surgebinding powers.

I'm not sure about that. Kalak might be indecisive, but the very act of founding the sons of honor confirms he's capable of extreme manipulation and duplicity. There's simply no way a herald started a "lets restart the desolations to restore vorinism!" club on good faith. He's been misleading his followers and treating them like patsies from the start. And I see no reason why he would have acted any less during Kaladin's enslavement. If anything there are two things we really need to keep in mind about Kalak when it comes to judging his part in what happened with Kaladin and Amaram. -Kalak would have innately known that a single full shardbearer would have been utterly inconsequential in the event of another desolation -Kalak would have had the familiarity with Radiants and Surgebinding to understand there were ways to explain a full shardbearer being defeated by an "ordinary" soldier outside of astronomical luck Kalak knows the Sons of Honor having a full shardbearer does nothing to advance their purported goals, and certainly it does nothing to advance any of his ulterior ones. He has no reason to get excited over a transference of "mundane" shards amongst mortals. But has plenty of possible reasons as a herald to panic over a prospective radiant returning. To me that suggests that if Kalak said anything to Amaram, it was less out of concern for what was to be done with the blade and plate and more towards viewing Kaladin as a threat. And in light of how he's manipulated the Son's of Honor, I don't doubt he could have made a knee jerk decision to try to talk Amaram into executing Kaladin. If Kalak suffered any indecisiveness, it's likely in that he wasn't able to convince Amaram to kill Kaladin outright at that time.

Dalinar progressing to become the next vessel of honor is IMHO a likely development latter in the series. Though naturally I'm not surprised that Brandon wouldn't be forthcoming on the matter either way.

Doesn't hemalurgy require some what exact positioning with respect to the kind of metal being used? I didn't get the impression it was something you could easily do without some prior knowledge or experimentation. I don't think it particularly likely that Vin would have done it correctly by chance when killing the lord ruler.

Well perhaps it's worth asking. Do the Listeners have a scientifically accurate understanding of how Spren bond to themselves? Parshendi characters in text have admitted that their understanding of how spren bonding should work doesn't explain how humans without gem hearts are capable of it. That inconsistency might make it worth asking how accurate their outlook is in general. To further consider. An alien looking to understand how human physiology worked might be somewhat lead astray if they went by the perspective of an educated medieval human who ascribed to humorism. It's possible that the Parshendi's assumptions about how they bond with spren are incorrect.

Well again, it's worth noting that people familiar with shardblades might have an explanation for that by assuming the bearer had not yet fully bonded their shardblade. Perhaps due to the previous owner having died recently. And oathbringer did establish that the gem stones that allow bonding aren't integral to the blades themselves, and can even be destroyed. I don't think that historically speaking, it'd be that out there for someone to have to go into battle/campaign with a blade that wasn't fully bonded, or that had it's gem stone damaged. People are probably over focusing on how odd a non-bonded Shardblade would be. At least in the short term. (Actually, given that the gem stones that allow blade summonings/dismissing aren't native to the blades themselves, do we have any basis that Azure's shardblade couldn't be fitted with such a gemstone, and that Azure just hasn't had a chance/reason to try to acquire one yet? Might be a decent Brandon Question).

I think to the average Rosharan, all those things are semantics for scholars to worry about. If you have a sword that can cut through stone, steel and flesh like its wet tissue paper, then for all they care its a shardblade. Technical definitions won't make someone any less dead if they get hit by it. Well does the twinky blade chop through stone, steel and flesh like wet tissue paper? Roshar's ultimately revere shardblades as practical instruments of war. And if a "weird" shardblade can do 90+% of what a "normal" shardblade can, I doubt they'd value it substantially less than a regular shardblade. At least anybody who had the imagination to think of it being turned on them.

But he could still be a creationist.

I really don't get the political aspect of something like that either. Radiants aren't hereditary. They're a "can you befriend/impress a spren?" meritocracy. Marriage ties don't bind alliances/inheritance with future radiants the way they do for other kinds of property or titles. I don't see marriage between orders of Radiants as manifesting in bonds more significant than the personal level. And while I'm all for the odd crack shipping, I don't seriously see being a major thing between Jasnah and Kaladin for a boat load of reasons.

The main problem to me seems to be that stormlight healing is somewhat limited by the persons self-image of what their body "should" be like. So you can't really force them to grow body parts that they don't imagine as naturally being part of themselves. We've seen that with trying to heal injuries that people have ingrained as part of themselves. So I'd imagine that the same would apply if you wanted to force someone to grow a mass of malignant tumors on themselves. The only exception I could imagine is if you had a person who believed their body *should* be filled with life threatening tumors. Then *maybe* stormlight healing would do that to them. Though that seems like it'd be an awful niche and situational way to use the healing surge.

As invocation said, we don't know how plate is formed. So it's up in the air if even the advanced skybreakers have it. Even if they did. We've only seen the skybreakers operating in the context as of a secret society. They might be able to summon shardblades with some plausible deniability, but shardplate might be too conspicuous and high profile for most of their activities. Nobody would expect "officers of the law" to show up for a raid in shardplate, and would absolutely question them being able to summon it onto their persons on command as we saw in some of Dalinar's visions.

It'd be a *very* writerly. BF not only is deserving of being accounted for his actions, there's not a whole lot of practical reasons to offer him much clemency. There are very few metrics of justice that would consider hanging BF for his actions out of the ordinary. Unrelated Pahn Kahl citizenry being subjected to reprisal as you said is something that I think Susebron would be much more worried about.And it's possibly one of many plot points that could come up as far as Susebron and Ciri trying to step forward in actually running Hallaldran.