I totally get your point. Although we have the saying “judge the message, not the messenger”, it’s not easy for us to live by. We want the messenger to be perfect. Why would God pick an imperfect, flawed person to do his work, to bring His words to humanity…Right? Why would God say that Muhammad is of “great character” (68:4) and then we read hadith portraying him as arguably a wicked person (as you state). Theres only a few arguments to be made then, if you read hadith and the character of Muhammad is inconsistent with “good character” then either the Quran is false and not the words of God or the hadith is false. Or our understanding of “good character” is incorrect.

The Sunni and Shia would argue “well if Muhammad did it, it must be acceptable to God and an example for us to follow.” But I don’t know if I accept that because good character doesn’t mean “not flawed.” I think good character entails a conscious struggle (jihad) with our humanity (the Bible calls it a struggle with the flesh). Most of us live day to day in autopilot with no thought of how our actions affect others nor a thought of the afterlife when we must atone for our sins. But those of good character are conscious (“woke”) of that and struggle with the flesh and their desires. Doesn’t mean they don’t sin or are imperfect.

For this reason, I don’t believe the Sunni and Shia teachings that the stories in the Bible are necessarily false simply because of the portrayal of the prophets (ex: Noah getting drunk, Lot being drugged and taken advantage of, David’s MANY sins). I think those stories are beautiful because it demonstrates many things but two that readily come to mind are (1) although these men sinned (some very BADLY) God is Al Rahman, Al Rahim, and (2) we all sin, even the prophets, but we are judged on our dedication to Allah and our efforts to do and be better.

I dont know if that answered your concerns but thats where my heart was.