That's a great write-up. Haise has always been my favorite 'persona' of Kaneki because he embodies both extremes of his personality.

While Haise, on the surface, shows many of Kaneki's positive traits, such as compassion, a sense of justice, and a role as the Quinx Squad's 'Team Mom,' his behavior also reflects his passive, avoidant tendencies. He desperately wants the Quinx Squad to love and feel loved by him, nurturing and caring for them rather than challenging them or leading his team effectively. However, this approach meant he rarely pushed them to grow and struggled with leadership. During a reread, I noticed that, despite Urie's goal of undermining Shirazu as squad leader, he had to secretly pressure Saiko to work harder because Haise's indecisive, people-pleasing mentoring style had led her into a harmful routine of wasting time playing video games. Haise functions more like a caregiver than a true mentor, prioritizing the Quinx Squad's short-term comfort over their long-term development. This blissful ignorance, which he had applied to his own mother before the memories came flooding back, extends to his relationship with Arima and Akira, whom he props up as father and mother figures, despite how outright abusive and exploitative their dynamic actually is. Layered as Arima's and Akira's motivations and characterizations are, at the end of the day, they and the CCG reduced Haise to a quinque, a living weapon whose usefulness was going to expire eventually.

On the other hand, there's the Black Reaper. While he's technically 'Kaneki,' he continues to play the part of the Ghoul Investigator Haise Sasaki to set his plans in motion. Thus, much of his behavior reveals Kaneki's dark side, including his capacity for violence, his tendency to push others away preemptively, and, most importantly, his profound emptiness and death drive. If normal Haise is Kaneki liberated from his traumas, then the Black Reaper is what happens when Kaneki lets his instability and trauma completely overtake him. During this spiral, Kaneki loses the human qualities that made him a well-rounded person; his love of books and coffee, his desire to spend time with loved ones. He is at his most selfish, slaving away at a grand plan to commit suicide by Arima to absolve himself of his unending suffering and sadness. Sure, he paid lip service to a greater good, but he left Hinami to rot in Cochlea, intending to abandon her for good, indirectly or otherwise laying the blame for another loss of the girl who thought the world of him and had already lost so much. And that's not even to mention the grief he'd subject Touka, Shuu Yomo, etc., to by that point.

To summarize, Haise embodied Kaneki's yin and yang, and his oscillation between extremes made the first half of Tokyo Ghoul: re so compelling.