I'm curious, is there anyone who actually seriously enjoys Perrin as a character? Forget all the analysis and literary commentary, does anyone actually turn the page when reading WOT and go 'awesome, a Perrin chapter!'?

Yes there is. From the very beginning Perrin has been my favourite character, and he has never lost the first place for me. Yes, maybe Mat has more moments of awesomeness, but as a whole he is quite annoying most of the time. Just the way an over-confident teenager is annoying to the middle-aged. Mat's and Rand's arcs are more uniformly spread. They develop constantly. (well, Mat upgrades, Rand's arc is sinusoidal with rises and depressions). On the other hand, Perrin's arc is with huge jumps, followed by long even periods. And yes, I do not jump only to his awesome chapters. When I finish my first read of a certain WoT book, I always start my re-read with Perrin's chapters, all of them in a row. Maybe his arc is not so entertaining in some books, but as a character I like him much more than any other in this series. And I think that Perrin is the best written by both Jordan and Sanderson. Perrin is simply more realistic than the others. Just ask yourselves, if you had Rand, Mat and Perrin as friends, whom would you trust most. For me there is no doubt that this is Perrin.

Well, in my country the first three volumes of Goodkind's SoT were translated and published before tEoTW (in late 1998). I thought that Goodkind's work is... well,... acceptable, maybe. Then I started reading WoT and although the writing was so much better, I thought that Jordan is stealing from Goodkind. Until I looked at the release dates on the first pages

The result was that I never read SoT after book 3