I'm 100% with you there on Loial's look and Tom's singing. I expected Loial to be bigger and have longer eyebrows. And Tom's voice is anything but melodic. It's not enough to ruin the show for me....just ways in which it differed from the books that I would have preferred they stayed the same.
Did they perhaps use the Trolloc battle and the burning out of the randos to illustrate the danger of using the Power? They probably could have illustrated that later in Season 2 or something, because I agree: Rand should have come in and shown what he was made of.