@MartianM00n @Hoss @egirlyuumimain You have to meet it halfway as nobody here would get a death note and decide he wants the world to fear him as though he were a god. Having that inherently unreasonable ambition changes what Light should want to do into many totally unreaaonable actions, and the myriad dramatic and personality-related threads tying Light and L together means neither of them can act perfectly rationally with regards to each other as their egos are locked together.

The writer's finger is still on the scale thougu and his limitations both internal and external still apply. The above doesn't excuse some of the dumbest parts but it makes a lot of the suboptimal decisions make sense.