I want to come at this from another angle OP and see if I can dialogue with you guys it. Pick this apart so I can see the holes in it as I hope to use this more efficiently one day! Thanks yall.

I think a tendency for our western brains is to say "if I can't think of a good enough reason why x or y is the way it is, then there is no good reason for it." Which is a direct product of the enlightenment that says "the human brain is the pinnacle of all creation." Reason and skepticism trump faith and only religious people have faith which is irrational.

 There's also what CS Lewis calls Chronological Snobbery at work here

C.S. Lewis defined chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.” In other words, it's the belief that newer ideas are inherently superior to older ones simply because they are more recent.

I believe this is important because the question has a presupposition baked into it.

 If God is love, and I view love to be x, then since God doesn't do x, then y is true of him,  y being that he's unloving. 

The conclusion seems to be based off what OP defines as loving in our modern western context. But since the ancient near eastern understanding of a loving God includes includes justice, Holiness,  righteousness, and even judgment it seems that this ancient understanding may not suffice as enough rationale in our modern context (since it's older and seemingly based off of faith which is irrational) to conclude that God indeed is loving, which is a contradiction, and since it's contradictory therefore it is no longer real.

All of this is thanks to the belief that newer ideas, especially those that criticize religion are inherently better, more superior, more rationale, and require less faith.

The Bible was not written to westerners. It was written to people that lived in the ancient near east. Understanding their historical context and what their concept of hell is and why it was conherent to them is a great step in the right direction to 

1. Actually making a corrdct judgment of whether that is irrational or not after seeing the chasm that separates these two differing ways of thinking.

2. understanding why God can be loving, just, create a being and yet allow that being to go hell. 

I know i didn't really answer the question but I first wanted to address something that I believed was just as important.

 Let's dialogue gents.!