Yeah but if the FS were released early enough to be important in the earlier books and were realistically competent enemies given their already existing advantages, Rand would either have to be mollycoddled for most of the series to survive, which would be tedious, or he would die in book 2. There's no way of keeping the FS in the series as a credible threat without reworking the entire thing. So it would be a mote mature series if it were utterly different. If the FS acted intelligently all the time, they would wipe the floor with everyone before Rand, Egwene etc got powerful, mature or genre savvy or otherwise good enough to touch them. That's why we have Taveren/instant protagonist-beneficial coincidence. That's why RJ had to work to make Taveren have negatives to counteract that. It's an integral part of the series. It was annoying in the early books but they had enough awesomeness to disguise the inherent flaws in RJ's world as one that we could believe.

Now both sides have seemed to mostly have tossed aside the Idiot Ball and it leaves things in an intriguing place. I'm going to try and focus on the positives of this than the early books when both sides had demonstrably intelligent characters doing really stupid things. It runs both ways (if the light had worked together from about books5-6 onward, the Shadow would have a much harder time, so RJ had to find ways of justifying idiocy on either side because of the type of conflict he wanted up set up).

Much fantasy of this type for this mainstream an audience gas simar flaws: when the protagonist or antagonist has so much power, either some really clever writing that is hard to implement and might bore much of the audience has to be created or some really stupid decisions have to be made. Read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, for all its flaws, to see how an intelligent Voldemort with all the knowledge he
had been found to have had for the entire series could easily win against a non-idiotic Harry in book 1 if he wanted to. But that would have annoyed people. As would have writing a book with characters of mediocre ability. A non- powerful enemy is dull in most people's eyes. For right or for wrong, people would rather read about a group of super powered villains making arrogant and foolish decisions than say a large society of ordinary manipulators control the hero because super powers are cool.