Fair enough. I wouldn't be against a revision that leaned more towards the Emperor being the friendlier, more heroic version you describe, although I'm not entirely sure whether that's where I feel like the fundamentals of him currently are.
I don’t think I described him as a hero. He’s, at the very least, an antihero, and I believe his morality and humanity are complex and nuanced. I do think his motivations are both understandable and sympathetic, which is quite different from being moral or heroic. His fundamentals are about how human he is in relation to the expectations we have of illithids being fundamentally inhuman. It has nothing to do with him being a hero.
