Unfortunately I think we’re also lacking a common basis for discussion a bit, because we haven’t read a lot of the same books.
But, let’s say we published a Harlequin Romance book in Japanese. I think we can broadly agree that these are complete dreck with no literary merit, and you could read them while drunk. Are they light novels? I don’t think many people would agree.
And, there are a lot of light novels that I don’t think you could read while drunk. Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list from my library (and I’ve excluded things I think you could read while drunk but that I nevertheless think have literary merit):
I can’t think of any real argument of how these wouldn’t be considered light novels when you could show pretty much any random Japanese person one and they’d tell you it’s a light novel.
I can definitely see the desire to change it from a meaningless marketing term to something that indicates quality, but I think it would be even more confusing when no one else is using it that way.
