The main issue with the supposed implication that everyone who's not fond of the Emperor as a character is just wrong / misunderstood him / is a [insert buzzword], is that it's not his supposed "otherness" that is the problem here. It's that he, an enabler and a manipulator who is very insistant about pushing the PC towards what is effectively a substance addiction or at the very least a monumental change to their physiology which could easily give someone less scrupulous a lot of powers to play with to their advantage, is being pushed as a sympathetic character when the writing in the game itself confirms he is anything but, and the Balduran connection is not only sloppily executed and opens a huge plothole and a timeline inconsistency but also just doesn't work because Balduran was never a character that well established beyond background details, so neither the player nor the player character has any reason to care about him as a person.
