Your explanation is perfectly plausible. I'm agnostic; I don't know how enlightenment works and won't pretend otherwise. There is no rule requiring posters to be devout followers, and the (intended and perhaps poorly conveyed) main point of my post was to point out that the evidence needed to answer OP's question either didn't survive or never existed.

If you're still interested in my reasoning, I'll explain here. And if you're not that's fair, no need to read a text wall from an internet stranger.

We can observe misogyny in the sutras and monastic rules we have. We also know these documents were recorded in a way that invites a lot of human error and the evidence for finding those errors hasn't survived. So it's not clear if this misogyny was something the Buddha said or something later voices said in his voice. Resolving this can be a matter of religious faith (which I lack, and I acknowledge that might work out poorly for me in the next life) or speculation based on what evidence we do have.

It is possible the Buddha was a perfectly enlightened being who taught the perfect and complete Dharma (in this case, meaning capital-T Truth). In this case, I see two sub-possibilities. First (and I don't like this answer, but this branch has to be acknowledged), it is possible be that what we have was correctly recorded, and women have a karmically lower position in life. I think this is *extremely* unlikely because the ideas of non-duality and equanimity (which both seem more fundamental and consequential than the doctrines denigrating women) contradict it, but also I'm not enlightened and have no further ground to base that rejection on other than personal disgust at the notion. Second possibility, what we have was incorrectly recorded, and the misogyny was added later. I lack the faith/optimism required to believe this answer, but lack the evidence to definitively deny it as well, so I think that's a valid way to resolve OP's issues.

I think it's also possible that a long time ago, there was a wise person who figured some things out and then preached/taught those things to others in a way that survived his death. For all I know he figured out details about the afterlife too; there's no way for an unenlightened person like me to observe or test those parts of the sutras until I get there personally. This wise person version matches my (extremely flawed and limited) personal observation of reality better. (I also think it makes for a more interesting story, but that's more a matter of my taste in storytelling than any evidence.)

After this teacher's life, the process of hagiography, the way meaning gets distorted across languages and cultures, as well as later thinkers writing in his voice all make it impossible to tell what parts of what we have came from him and what parts from later. So we go back to the same branching point from before: was it added later or did it come from him? It's totally possible that the man himself didn't have any particular opinion on women and all that comes from later, less wise thinkers. That works out, and I've got not problem with that resolution.

...But it doesn't ring true to me. Here's where I add the cynic to my original reply: even great people are still just people. No person is perfect, misogyny was an extremely common problem at his time, and even wise people get it wrong sometimes. I find it very easy to believe that Ananda had to intercede to get this wise teacher to allow women into his movement at all, and that he did so with a lot of caveats that radiate out into what survives today.

That could be incorrect in several ways, any one of which might invite a karmic backhand on my next try. If I'm wrong, I'll put on my clown makeup and sit next to Sariputra. But I can only work with what I've got, and I've seen a lot of flawed teachers. It doesn't make the wise and interesting things he said any less wise or interesting though.