Finished My TH5312 Paper! YAY!!

It only took a month but my final project for Patriology, Christology, and Pneumatology is finished! Praise the Lord.
We were asked to evaluate the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son by the Father. Up until this class I had not heard of this teaching, but apparently it has been the majority view for centuries. It came out of the word "monogenes" used of Christ, as well as "Son of God" and "Born of God." From there it grew more and more complicated. Major theologians have argued about the doctrine for a very long time. H. Orton Wiley says the Son relies on the Father for His divine essence. Shedd says the Persons of the Trinity cannot be distinguished from each other without the doctrine, and that without it God would not be a Trinity. Notice these two are about as far apart as one can get in the Calvin/Arminius debate.
After careful research, I have come to the conclusion that eternal generation would violate the attributes of God. Calvin came to the same conclusion, by the way. Both Wiley and Shedd say that God's attributes are His essence, and that the essence is shared equally by all three Persons of the Trinity. Hence, God's attributes must also be shared equally. But in order to make eternal generation make sense, they have to say that the Father's "unique" attribute is generation, and the Son's "unique" attribute is being generated. Another problem is that they say the "generation" is the Father giving the essence to the Son. If they all share the essence equally, how does this happen? Or does it imply that there was a time when the Son did not have the essence of the Father?
I don't know how exactly the Persons of the Trinity interact, and how They are differentiated, but I think eternal generation is not the answer.