He's ahead of Jane because the plot demands it. I wish I wasn't joking.

Jane is much smarter than Red John. This is an indisputable fact, which can be supported by all that we have seen throughout the entire viewing of the series and the finale. However, I think Red John and Jane act in different degrees of accessibility. Let's look at it from an objective point of view. Red John - he is not very smart, even if he is charismatic and has some psychology and hypnosis skills, but there is no way to compare him with Jane in terms of intelligence. But, how does Red John act? Red John is not bound by any moral framework, he uses people as tools, and at the right moment just throws them away. This is the first. Second. Red John has a lot more freedom of action than Patrick. He does not obey the law, the law is nothing to him, he just plays with it. He is not bound by any obligations. He is a sheriff in a small county where there is quite a bit of work, which means he can devote all his time to playing with Patrick and his hobby. The third. I believe that Red John initially chose Patrick Jane as his target, because he knew that he would bring him an unforgettable experience, impressions and fame, because Red John is a showman. It took him a long time to approach the plan and image that he has now. He has been preparing for a very long time. He created his own organization, he himself infiltrated the law enforcement agencies so that no one would suspect him, while at a sufficiently high position. He hid his past and all the threads that lead to it. I found connections, introduced them to the same law enforcement agencies. In general, he went to such kind of events for a very long time. What about Patrick? For most of his life, O was a fraudster who was not interested in either connections or the law. And only recently began working with the law to catch Red John. But here's the bad luck.. To have the power of the law in your hands, you need to fulfill the relevant requirements, and specifically - work. And this job did not allow him to focus on Red John. She did not give him freedom of action, because he was bound by the law. But he couldn't do anything without him, because he doesn't have the connections that Red John has, earned throughout his life. Simply put, he has much less power, opportunities and much more conditions. But at the same time he has a huge level of intelligence, hypnosis and psychology skills. I would call him a natural genius. After all, what Patrick does is impossible for any ordinary person. Not only is his level of attention to detail abnormal, but he also has a gigantic level of information processing. He has time to notice small details and in microseconds to make an even chain of events or structure out of them. That's really who can be called superhuman, so it's Patrick Jane. And this is confirmed by the fact that it was only thanks to his abilities and intelligence that he was able to capture such an influential person who had been preparing for such a thing all his life, Red John, while along the way he revealed his organization and destroyed all the works of his life. That's the answer. It was a confrontation of power, influence and diligence against intelligence and genius.