I'm 50% on white. I found Cold Forge a slog to get through. Downright boring at times. I was completely the opposite on Charybdis. I will admit that a few twist in that one were made better with the knowledge of Cold Forge, but I just all around found Charybdis to be superior to both TCF and the New Era EU, with only the first half of the Tristian comic series making me feel the same way that I did watching the first three movies in even semi recent memory outside of Charybdis.
Before that and you had to go back to mid run Dark Horse, or AVP2, or end run Bantam (that Berserker novelization) to get the same kind of feeling imo.