I read Sanderson’s Elantris first, and found it really pedestrian. I reviewed it on a fantasy forum I was a member of at the time, and Sanderson himself responded. He was very nice about it, and basically said that Elantris was the 5th novel he’d written (1st he’d published) while Mistborn was the 11th novel he’d written (2nd he’d published), and he’d learned a lot in between the writing of those two books. So if I was inclined to give him a second chance I might find Mistborn more to my liking. I did give him a second chance, and I really liked Mistborn. Sanderson isn’t the greatest writer on earth, and he still has a lot of tendencies that put me off, but he tells a good story

This is not trying to excuse how Butcher writes women, because I do find it gross, but I think the difference between Dresden Files and Codex Alera is that Dresden started out as an ode to old school hard-boiled detective novels, which gave Butcher some cover to let his sexism fly unchecked. Again, this is not an excuse, because he didn’t have to write his women as hollow sex vamps to evoke the hard-boiled aura he was going for; he chose to do that. Plus, there’s plenty of scenes where Harry is trying to be chivalrous, and you can tell that Butcher has no idea how deeply misogynistic his idea of chivalry is (a good amount of those scenes are just masturbatory fantasies wherein Harry eventually decides to do the “right thing”)