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Most stories include dumb people doing dumb things and getting lucky enough for the problems to end up solved.
Lelouch is a smart person doing smart things, who always ends up getting royally ******** over by luck every time.

It's refreshing. I might hate him for joking around about the mass slaughter of Japanese, but in all fairness he didn't have any idea that was going to happen.

I think you just stated one of the major reasons why I love Code Geass
It's kind of the opposite of most "hero" stories: smart guy does smart things, luck always screws him over, but eventually he's able to solve his problems.
While some things you can link to his personality or other situations not pertaining to luck, sometimes he's just EXTREMELY unlucky (like the offhand joke being turned into a massacre)

While the large scale battles were really weird (especially the last one, though, unlike what other people say I think it was them just messing with each other rather than honest tactics), he tends to be on the better end of the information war and just has good tactics