I mean, I wasn't trying to be hostile, I didn't intend to come off that way, it was moreso that I interpreted his disagreement to mean that we're making this argument up. Might have been my mistake or maybe he didn't clarify himself properly. Regardless, I wasn't getting hostile or anything, his argument didn't make much sense to me.
Like this;
A lack of finesse in control over a substance wouldn't imply that they are supposed to make that substance act "more like the natural thing", it's the opposite. A person who can't control lightning properly would have less ability to control and alter its traits to be something outside of how it would work naturally. Same with light manipulation. The absolute weakest light manipulators are seldom capable of anything more than a flash of light, which is actually one of the most mundane and natural ways a light superpower can be used. To argue that someone unskilled in the use of that superpower is actually going to have to work HARDER for the substance they manipulate to work as it NORMALLY does is absolutely backwards, which is why I brought up what it was.
This was me interpreting what you said as "If they suck at the power, it's not gonna look right," when it's the opposite— the point of these powers is that you make the substance look far from what it's supposed to be. You seem to be coming at this from the perspective of "higher speed or more realistic substance = better control" but that's fundamentally false.
Edit: I read what you said again to see if i'm Misinterpreting you and, I don't exactly know but it also sounds like you're saying that it's the job of the verse to establish that light can be manipulated in a way that makes it have strange qualities.
My problem is, we assume that every verse, unless stated otherwise, has this metric of skill and control— that is to say, as all across fiction things like Fire manipulation or lightning manipulation do things that are impossible in the natural world, like being condensed into weapons and cutting things as though they were the solid objects they're meant to mimic, light would be no different. We, or at least I assume that every verse has the manipulation of a certain substance be placed on a gradient that goes from "Mundane/normal" to "far different than normal".
Waterbenders have to give water the unique quality of being able to cut things when condensed into a blade, as water can't do that on its own, and very bad waterbenders can barely move it from one place to another, nevermind making it razor sharp. This isn't even an assumption, this is consistent over almost all fiction.
An American comic book water manipulator who's trash at using it has trouble moving flames in one direction or another, never mind condensing it into a sphere that explodes for some reason. Logic would stand that normally in fiction, a bad water manipulator wouldn't be able to make their water blast explode without a reason like it often does in fiction. Think about how weird it is in Pokémon that water shuriken explodes into vapor on contact instead of just... Sploosh. Things like that.
To me, it's very ass backwards to assume that someone's inability to have their superpower be mundane is a testiment of a lack of skill with it, when it's almost always the opposite. Light manipulators who can't manipulate light well would likely, no, almost certainly have less of an easy time letting their light construct disperse like real light and effectively relinquishing control and letting light behave normally (as in without them messing with it) than they would making a polearm out of photons.
