Like I said, could've been salvaged with better writing and characterization, and your take on it sounds exactly like what was needed and should have happened. Hell, Peter David, who wrote Spider-Man: Edge of Time, the final/true villain of which was an older Peter Parker from 2099 driven out of his mind by a century's worth of guilt and grief and determined to "fix" everything that had gone wrong in the past, regardless of what it would cost, showed that he could have written at least a solid take on a Peter Parker fallen from grace and having lost his way, so from that vantage point, Ben Reilly: The Scarlet Spider was even more disappointing.