Dr. Light is the bad guy.

[Magnus]

Wily: I want these robots, a term which literally means slave, to be extra efficient and if they break, we can just make more.
Light: No I want robots to have human intellect so they can call me daddy, appreciate my genius, and know the cold fear of death approaching.
Wily: That is morally reprehensible and against the purpose for robots!
Light: This man disagrees with me and is therefore my enemy. Quick call some generic committee and pretend they have the power to stop Wiley from doing his own work.

[Devsman]

I mean, you could argue Light being a jerk was one reason Wily went cookoo, but you kind of can't ignore Wily responding to said treatment by repeatedly trying to destroy stuff, rule the world, scam everyone out of money, resurrect ancient evils, etc etc.

[SparkTFS]

I think Dr. Light is kind of well intentioned, despite it being in a somewhat twisted way.

Maybe Wily could have convinced others that Light was wrong if they caused problem by their own, while he created his own, non sentient robots. But when he stole Light's robots and made them go berserk, only another robot could stop them, so it kind of had more of counter effect.

At the same time, if Wily didn't let his resentment and ego take over his mind, we probably wouldn't have so many Mega Man games to play, haha!

By the way, in my headcanon, maybe Light's blind optimism of wanting robots to be so human could have lead indirectly the reason for some type of event between the end of Classic saga and the beginning of X's that showed robots as such a dangerous treat that robotics advancements would halt for the next 100 years, when Dr. Cain revolutionizes the area by creating the reploids based on X's design.

Still, I think I wouldn't call him a bad guy. But instead someone with good intentions but with misdirected efforts and small awareness of what such advancements of robots could lead to. Ironic enough, he never wanted to create weapons of war, but Wily's schemes keeps making him needing to upgrade Mega Man with a stronger arsenal everytime.

TL; DR: I think he's not a bad guy, but he also doesn't take into account the consequences of his good, but probably kind of misdirected intentions.

Sorry for the long text. I was kind of wanting to talk about it for a long time!

[Mr. Brokencyde]

Initially yeah it's easy to side with Wily.
Doesn't excuse all the destruction he caused afterwards though. Remember the guy intentionally engineered the Zero virus (later known as sigma virus) which completely f'd the world for centuries and the near extinction event colony drop of X5 all out of some bizarre grudge.

[Buzzsaw]

No, Dr. Light is good but his identical twin brother Dr. Right is evil and secretly working with Dr. Wily

[khaosklub]

that's way off base. Light didn't advocate for robots to be self aware and have emotions, he wants them to be more intelligent to be able to do their jobs smarter and be aware of the state of their systems, so they could inform their masters that they are in need of repairs and such.

Light didn't bring together a committee to stop wily's research, they presented both their plans to the research committee in charge, and they decided what research the organization would continue in.

[funewchie]

Originally posted by Chuck, Sneed, the list goes on:

Initially yeah it's easy to side with Wily.
Doesn't excuse all the destruction he caused afterwards though. Remember the guy intentionally engineered the Zero virus (later known as sigma virus) which completely f'd the world for centuries and the near extinction event colony drop of X5 all out of some bizarre grudge.

According to Capcom themselves, Wily didn't make that Virus, at least not on purpose.
Zero had a flaw in his program, and Wily didn't have time to fix it (possibly due to his age and/or failing health).
So, he designed a diagnostics program to locate and fix the flaw in Zero.
But, the flaw was so severe that it mutated the diagnostic/repair program into the Virus.

(Though ironically, by infecting Zero, the virus actually ended up fulfilling it's original purpose, and fixed him. That's why Zero's "immune" to the Virus: he actually is infected by it, but it can't break anything, it can only fix him.)

Originally posted by khaosklub:

that's way off base. Light didn't advocate for robots to be self aware and have emotions, he wants them to be more intelligent to be able to do their jobs smarter and be aware of the state of their systems, so they could inform their masters that they are in need of repairs and such.

Light didn't bring together a committee to stop wily's research, they presented both their plans to the research committee in charge, and they decided what research the organization would continue in.

Exactly.

Dr. Light was advocating for robots to have better judgement.
Asimov's Laws of Robotics and basic programming can only do so much.
He felt it was would be better of a robot could have better sense of judgement, including a sort of "common sense".

(As an example, a problem with robots in various media is with illogical orders.
Such as a villain (trapping his enemies in a room) telling a robot "Kill everyone in this room!".
...Now, a human soldier would be able to correctly reason that such an order implicitly means "Kill everyone in this room... except for me, obviously".
But a regular robot by definition doesn't have the common sense or judgement to make that assumption, and would take the order exactly as spoken (much to the villain's horror))

Or as you said, to be able to know when they needed repairs or even just some calibrations.

So yeah, by improving a robot's mental abilities, Light advocated making them wiser. Among other things, giving them that sort of common sense to do their jobs much more effectively, without having to be constantly babysat and micromanaged by a human.
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(On a side note, Reploids were likely more of a result of the Wily Wars, when improvements to a robot's morality became a hot topic, for obvious reasons.
Asimov's 3 Laws were shown to not be good enough. Robots needed to have a conscience, one that Wily or others couldn't just reprogram away.)
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As was said, the committee was about who gets funding.

In theory, if Wily had the money himself, he could just go ahead and do that Gear research on his own.
No one was stopping him from doing it. Only his checkbook was.