Donaldson seems to go in for unsympathetic protagonists. In the Thomas Covenant books, Covenant feels guilt. He goes on and on, endlessly kvetching about his guilt. At one point, he feels guilt for something someone else did. Donaldson also suffers from what I call "William F. Buckley's Disease", in that he has an immense vocabulary and wants to show it off. He uses the word "coign" where any other person would have "balcony". He has one character tell Covenant that he is uxorious; a claim that is meretricious. Indeed, the claim is completely mendacious (for one thing, the character is unmarried) -- but what can one expect from a man who is wearing a carcanet? I could also go on at length about his novel The Real Story, but that is SF, not fantasy.
I have mixed feelings about Raymond Feist's Magician series. He can write, and the trilogy he did with Janny Wurts, Daughter of the Empire, Servant of the Empire, and Mistress of the Empire are really good. However, he just seems to go on and on, book after book, and never comes to a conclusion. In the last of that series, he has a character who is the great-great grandson of someone who is a boy in the first book.
I started reading Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. However, after about the eighth book, in which everyone seemed to going to and fro but not going on, I lost interest.
David Eddings started well with The Belgarion, but the next series, The Malloreon is the same story retold. Eddings seems to believe that people living in one country are all exactly alike, which is simply laziness on his part. Eddings' last series, The Dreamers, is total crap. Much of it consists of the same incidents as seen by two different characters -- and since the two have very similar reactions, why bother? The series ends by a god "hitting the cosmic reset button", which is cheating. His Redemption of Althalus is for the most part fun, although the last quarter or so of the novel is rushed.
I liked Weeks's Night Angel trilogy, for the most part. He does have a serious consideration of "what sort of person could be an assassin?" His conclusion is that it takes someone who is seriously damaged psychologically. He also does well with the question, "what do you do when all your choices are bad?"
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