I’m not telling you to be held accountable for my opinions, I’m telling you precisely
why DRAMATIC TENSION is no excuse for asinine writing and vice-versa as you so like to claim. Bad writing is bad writing is bad writing. Drama can and should be included, but not at the cost of the quality of the writing.
When holes and inconsistencies start to show up in the plot, it is the writer’s prerogative to identify them and alter the narrative accordingly so that they won’t
be issues anymore. It's really no different from identifying typos and spelling errors, just much more more complicated. When a few holes are left open, they could very well count as mistakes or small errors in the narrative. Understandable, but something a writer should always be wary of and attempt to keep to a minimum. When many holes start littering it, or there happen to be few very big ones, it’s a sure sign the story wasn’t thought through nearly as well as it should have been.
To take, say, your Portal example, the solution to that slip-up would be for the level designers and artists to get rid of the cracks in the environments. To take your ME1 example, well that might require a little more creativity. If photos of the ship were presented to the council, then the whole subplot of getting evidence to prove Saren’s guilt could be cut entirely and Wrex, Garrus, and Tali would have to be recruited through alternative means. You could also have it so that the photos of Sovereign would be too blurry to be considered irrefutable evidence and would be appropriately shot down. Or you could give Sovereign some jamming technology to make getting photographic evidence impossible. Etc, etc. If you have problems with any of these ideas, well, we could bounce them back and forth if you like, but that's not really my point. My point is that a writer should always be ready to cover his story's ass.
And to take your Flowers for Algernon example…uh, actually, that’s not really a problem with the story. It’s part of the protagonist’s personality to not be able to talk about his problems with others, especially when he himself is not exactly the most people-smart guy out there. If you'd understand me correctly, you would see I have not been arguing that everything in a story must happen perfectly, but to have the story unfold
plausibly. If a character is somebody who whines instead of deal with their problems, then it would be
plausible that they would spend a good chunk of the story whining.
And while we're at it, how about I address the silly way the suicide mission was planned out in ME2, just for kicks. There’s actually a potentially easy explanation that could have been used that would have had minimal effect on the plot as it was (though it still has many other issues, but let's ignore that for the sake of our sanity). At the beginning, TIM would explain that prior to resurrecting Shepard, he actually managed to gather intel on what lies on the other side of the Omega 4 Relay, and discovered what we see in game: a solitary base in the middle of an asteroid field with only one ship to defend it. Alternatively, an early mission could be added in that would involve sending a drone ship of some sort through the relay. Either way, based on what the characters find out and their own experiences on military matters, they could conclude that the best way to take out the Collectors would be to send in a lone mobile ship armed with an ace pilot and a crack team of elite commandos whom would board the base and take it from the inside.
Now I’ll admit, these solutions probably have their own issues since I just came up with them over the course of a couple of minutes. But they work better than what’s already in the game because they show that the mission was not contrived by the plot in a way to make it succeed, but that it was planned out to ensure the best chance it
would succeed by the characters. Sure, the crew isn’t going to know what to expect once they get inside the base since the intel would (and should) only provide so much, but that’s precisely why a team with such a diverse set of skills would be recruited in the first place; to handle whatever would be thrown at them.