Yes, so often we're simply told that this character is the most brilliant person ever... but then they miss obvious things and simply jump to impossible conclusions or whatever.
Writing characters that are actually intelligent is really, really hard and I tend to remember the few characters that seem honestly clever that I really tend to remember those. I still remember my jaw dropping when L first told Kira he was coming after him in Death Note because of the clever way that was executed. Not to mention how both of those characters exhibited a very different sort of intelligence and you could follow their reasoning process most of the time.
Effectively communicating the thought processes of characters seems to be much more prevalent among Japanese writers of popular media. I suspect this is at least in part because American writers in industries like Hollywood look down on their audiences or are encouraged to simplify and remove nuances by marketers, where Japanese writers tend to trust their audiences to handle much more.
Where Japanese writers suffer is, not unlike the American TV show writer, in the business incentive to drag a series out for as long as possible to milk the most money out of it. Anyone would run out of material under those circumstances. The best serializations are those smaller ones that either planned the arc of the story from the beginning, or never pretended to have one in the first place.
It was clear that the author of Death Note spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about the first few volumes before they published anything. It started densely packed with cleverness, but Naomi Penber was the last fancy trick for quite a while, presumably because they could not continue to invest so much time in each page. There was nothing as intricate and clever as Yagumi Light's hidden desk compartment from that point until, perhaps, the finale.
Oh definitely, the series started out amazing and slowly went downhill to being rather decent. I think that just shows us how hard this kind of writing is, even for really talented writers. It takes a lot of thought and time and cleverness and it's not something that can be just churned out regularly.
The first episodes with the Teacher are okay, but it really kicks into high gear when they being playing 'minority rules' later on. Really marvelous!
If you enjoy a real challenge read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's the most rewarding puzzle I've ever tangled with. I was up for days, weeks, thinking about it afterwards.
Writing characters that are actually intelligent is really, really hard and I tend to remember the few characters that seem honestly clever that I really tend to remember those. I still remember my jaw dropping when L first told Kira he was coming after him in Death Note because of the clever way that was executed. Not to mention how both of those characters exhibited a very different sort of intelligence and you could follow their reasoning process most of the time.