I have to say I'm a little amazed that people are "hating" the idea of using the JUMP button of all things to JUMP. gasp. And have you ever wall jumped in other games? It's fairly common to have to press a direction and jump. That aside, it makes sense. You want to turn around? You can't, cuz there's a wall there. That's stupid. You want to double jump? You can't, cuz there's a wall there. That's also stupid.
I'm guessing this light press is similar to short hop. To me personally, that'd be annoying since I'm no pro at doing it, and it seems like legitimate wall jump opportunities only come so often and you don't want to screw it up. I wouldn't hold it against you to have that as a solution but yeah I'd hate it.
However, using my solution of direction + jump in order to yes, jump in that direction, will be easy and obvious, and would cut down on accidental wall jumps almost entirely. You can deliberately not hold a direction just before you jump so that you don't accidentally wall jump. To me, this is in the spirit of control for high level play, whether or not you personally have come into many situations where it's a problem. Light press also works, though I can't say it makes a lot of sense.
Though it's not limited to this, I also somewhat seriously design custom stages and I've had a few with walls, usually suspended, where this issue happens more frequently.