I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I also think you need to pay closer attention to the text itself. You say that Odysseus "gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego", but the seventh line of the poem says that Odysseus' men perished because of "their own recklessness" (αὐτῶν ... σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν). Their own recklessness. Not Odysseus' ego.
"It's not at all about justice."
The poem is intensely interested in justice. The very first speech in the poem (1.32ff.) is all about justice, as is the second speech (1.45ff.). Characters in the poem, both gods and mortals, reflect on justice all the time. It may not be what you consider justice, but it's justice in the poem's own terms.
> I think you are mistaken to judge a 3,000+ year old poem by your own moral standards.
I think you are mistaken to take this cliche and try to apply it to real people. I'm not really interested in your characterizations of me. Stick to the subject and leave other commenters out of it.
It's a mistake to take the narrator at face value. When Odysseus yells his real name to the Cyclops - without which Poseidon wouldn't have had a vendetta and kept them on that long journey - or when he taunts the giants who throw the boulders and kill his men and destroy his ships, it is his recklessness and not his men's that gets them killed. When he dallies in his flings with Circe and Calypso, while others wait and suffer, that's on his lust and ego. His men do some stupid things too, but it would not be hard to attribute that to his leadership - there are no bad followers, as they say ...
The narrator, either in earnest or maybe with some tongue in cheek, loves Odysseus no matter what he does. But if we are to read any story critically, we can't trust narrators any more than the characters they describe, something especially true in epics from the Odyssey to the Inferno to Moby Dick.
In the Odyssey people talk about the politics of power, how angering the gods gets bad results and so you'd better respect them; and they talk about fairness for themselves in the selfish way that everyone does - disregarding how they treat others. But those things aren't morality. The same things others are cursed for are what Odysseus is lionized for by the narrator and others. The only higher 'morality' is the politics on Olympus of Athena's and Poseidon's dispute over Odysseus' fate.
There is much discussion of the treatment of strangers and guests, one of those rules of the gods. However, I see it as more an issue of human relations - what do you do with strangers? whom do you trust? - there is no consistent enforcement by the gods or consequence when the rules are violated.
I also think you need to pay closer attention to the text itself. You say that Odysseus "gets his men killed over and over due to his capricious, pointless acts of ego", but the seventh line of the poem says that Odysseus' men perished because of "their own recklessness" (αὐτῶν ... σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν). Their own recklessness. Not Odysseus' ego.
"It's not at all about justice."
The poem is intensely interested in justice. The very first speech in the poem (1.32ff.) is all about justice, as is the second speech (1.45ff.). Characters in the poem, both gods and mortals, reflect on justice all the time. It may not be what you consider justice, but it's justice in the poem's own terms.