analyticaposteriori

Coming back to this - those are some really strange choices made by BS. The book is 1300 pages long, your two main characters spend 4 of 5 Parts mostly in the same place and yet you barely give them any scenes (and i'm not talking only about romantic ones, but all kinds) and when you can give them some (flying to the peaks for a better view of the tower, flight to Thaylen) you weirdly omit them. Once again all of this keeps happening on the back of the fantastic WoR chasm sequence. It's worth noting that both of these most noticeably omitted scenes happen in the section of the book where Kal has no POV (tower drawing in the Second Part and they come back from Thaylen in the first scene of the Third Part so the whole thing plays out sometime during the ending of Second Part/Interlude) which could indicate Shallan may be suppresing something about them and that's why don't get see her POV. Then again if anything interesting happened Kaladin would probably reminisce about it.

that's why the timeskip exists

That "something else" probably won't include fighting a pitched war with a city busting level of magic though. Unless you want the kid to grow up a mental trainwreck. And nobody is trying to "limit women" here - fathers would run into the same exact problem.

Shallan/Adolin just feels so vanilla/passionless in comparison to Shalladin. Just randomly flipping through the book: Yeah, she should really ride that wind, right Kal? She really merely reminds you of Tien... Find me a similar suggestive thought process in Shadolin, I dare you... at this point I am starting to think that all these constant "wind" innuendos are unintentional and Brandon is wholly oblivious to writing them, seeing as what he apparently considers the proper pairing.

Yep, that WoB makes it pretty clear that what some called pseudoShallan is actually the real Shallan (so I assume Veil/Radiant aren't really as essential parts of her as some of us thought) and that she is actually on the upswing at the end of OB. Disappointing.

I wouldn't be too surprised if Brandon, no matter how well he has plotted Stormlight out at this point, ran into the similar timeskip problems many other authors did when actually writing the book (cough GRRM).

I think Dalinar's last POV says Adolin's already married. I guess some horizontal tango's already going on by the time he pens down the title of Oathbringer.

A far more concrete structure would be greatly appreciated.

I really don't get the planned one year gap with so many immediate issues presenting itself at the end of OB. Just staying with Shallan for now (and assuming that the end of OB in fact doesn't represent a start of some automatic, powered by power of love healing process for her of which we will only get to see the lovey-dovey, birth-giving end at the start of Book 4) - surely her problems won't stay static for a year - so much changed in just a few weeks of OB. And surely with how complicated her problems are BS won't just timeskip over them to some state of Shallan that is completely disconnected from her state at the end of OB. Afterall the journey is important and there won't be more of her flashbacks.

Well for me personally it's less about shipping and more about the obvious structural problems OB created both for itself and retroactively for WoR. I don't really care who ends up with whom (and I have zero problems with Adolin remaining the nicest guy on the block who somehow anchors the ridiculousness around him) but the writing should've been far stronger (without disregarding the previous plot threads and ignoring the ones that should've been explored) if this is truly the end of it.

The biggest question mark here really is Brandon's intent. On one hand the developments and things related in OB to this triangle thingy are so obviously hinting at more - foreshadowings, endless implications, poorly constructed and thus brittle justifications made by Shallan at the end together with her mental problems... it feels like a clear setup for this thing to continue (in possibly very interesting ways). On the other hand there are BS' past writings and the weird finality that some of the resolutions in OB have - namely the wedding and the ending of the conversation between Shallan and Kaladin. I mean this is just brutal: Kal says the worst thing he can say in that moment and then it feels like the relationship just comes to a screeching halt and takes a suicide dive off a cliff. It's even worse when you consider it's pretty much the only personal conversation these two have in 1300 pages. Two main characters who spend 4/5 of a doorstopping book pretty much together have a single meaningful conversation? Just compare it to the chasm sequence... If BS wrote in big black letters on the back cover that this is the end of this arc it would probably be less obvious than what he actually did.