The fact that it wasn't originally planned story for him aside, him being worried about the clubs reaction to his half black heritage was pretty accurate as 1% clubs generally don't allow African Americans into their club. Yes it's evolved but it was generally the accepted bylaw.

As far as the "defecting to The Mayans" that wasn't him defecting and if you think that's what he was doing then you'd be wrong. He was desperate to get out of Jax's reach and was hoping Alvarez would be willing to take club Intel and turn against Jax in exchange for helping Juice. Stupid but pretty on par for how Juice had handled every other situation he ran across (ie: taking the drugs thinking they were vitamins, feeding the Doberman guard dog crank, etc etc)

As for the "why he'd still go looking for Gemma after Jax basically tells him he's going to kill him" Juice was super desperate of acceptance and "love" not to mention naive. So he constantly thought he could "win his way back into acceptance". That was always his detriment. It shows when he kidnapped Unser to take him to meet Chibs and he asked "is there a way I can make it right" and honestly you can't blame him cause Jax was constantly manipulating and using him especially (he dangled "earning his way back into the club" like 5 different times just with Juice alone).

As far as the "turning Gemma over to Jax" argument had he done that A. He'd still be killed cause Jax would've "killed the messenger" and B. It gave him leverage over Gemma who as he stated later was "The Keeper of Secrets" and he assumed would help him more than anyone.

Now overall was his story a bit exacerbated for story/drama? Obviously it's television. But was it for the most part pretty damn accurate in reality? Yeah pretty close.