Byakuryuu... I can see where you're coming from.
I disagree, but on subtle points. The thing is that I don't think that Kirito is
supposed to be a flawless self-insert character... I think he just turned into that because the author wasn't sure how to tell the story he wanted to tell.
I guess the thing is, I'm not comparing Kawahari Reki to Stephanie Mayer, in my head I'm comparing Reki to
Neal Stephenson, in his height as the author who took cyberpunk by storm in the early ninties with a book that had a main character named, I kid you not, Hiro Protagonist.
Reki isn't as ambitious, but the world his characters are hanging around in is fundamentally interesting. "What if the people were literally trapped in a video game?" I mean, if you honestly and sincerely tried to sum up SAO in one sentence, it would be about what
Kayaba did, not really whatever Kirito got up to. In that case Kirito just becomes a vehicle to look at the world with, rather than a vehicle to fantasize about being cool... although I'm not going to deny that the second thing there happened, I think that was more a side-effect of trying to dress up the protagonist as cool and interesting without really succeeding. (Personally I think that Klein had a much more solid design as an "interesting main character", I think he had a much more definitive story arc).
Well, if scifi has one flaw as a literary form, it's that these interesting worlds are populated by flat characters, so there's that.
I guess basically my point is I'm willing to cut Reki slack in ways that you aren't willing to.