Nerding out about Dune is tremendously cool and i love it, you can pick any thread to pull and it always goes somewhere.

The details of the plot don’t necessarily map neatly, but the aesthetics, the fantasy, the torture-versus-dust-specksness of it is what the rationalists are all about.

Isn't aspiring for the aesthetics while ignoring the (admittedly heavily lore driven and not especially applicable to irl) substance exactly what the torment nexus meme is about though? Except I don't think there is a dust-speckness aspect to the GP, you aren't future-human-population-maxxing¹, the point seems to be to ensure there is a future where humanity's collective free will isn't utterly tethered to a prescient autocrat², and the prescriptive aspect is that we should be part of an open system instead of say locked in with the great man of history du jour, which is also in keeping with the ecological framing.

It's been a while but I don't think the Golden Path is even that front and center in the text, Dune 4: GEOD is basically a character study on the God emperor, who is one of the most unique and fascinating characters in sci-fi³.

I think this is why the GP is a TINA situation by authorial decree, it's Frank Herbert going listen, I'm doing my best to write a suicidal rebirth god archetype as a layered and relatable-yet-utterly-othered character, you are not supposed to be worrying that much if there could be a GP-but-liberal with more individual thriving and less oppressive totalitarianism, I assure you he's thought about it extensively and he thinks there sure can't and that's it.

Have you read the Dosadi Experiment? It’s a very strange book and a good way to get a high dose of Herbert’s obsessions from a new perspective.

The Bureau of Saboteurs books along with Godmakers were my favourite non-Dune Herbert books! I also found the Dragon in the Sea fascinating 20 years ago and think I should revisit, and also finally read the follow up collaborations that only seem to be available unofficially. Also The White Plague gave late-teens me nightmares.

I remember Dosadi as being more about FH going all out on the intrigue and deep lore to the point where the latter parts of the book are basically written in innuendo, you are literally expected to read between the lines to understand what the hell is going on, I wish my parents had as much faith in me as Frank Herbert had in his readers.

But the more you scratch the more unambiguously evil he is.

The worst aspects of FH I'm aware of are that he was a shitty fucking parent and hated Iron Maiden, unambiguously evil seems stretching it, unless you were his son.

I think there even is a case to be made about how Frank Herbert is the anti-L. Ron Hubbard, using sci-fi literature as an efficient outlet for his psychedelics/mysticism/ecology/psychosexuality obsession oscilliation and actually leaving a descent literary legacy instead of starting a cult or several, but this post is already running so long it's starting to need an editor.

1. sigh
2. This has additional metaphysical implications with how prophecy works in the duniverse, in the sense that it's not only about being forever in complete submission to Empire in some traditional ultracolonialist sense, you are essentially reduced to just a part of another man's waking dream as they pick and choose what future track to lock the timeline in.
3. And is also the first person narrator of the book. Both the remaining Dune books also switched to full first person point-of-view narration with very little in terms of an omniscient guiding perspective, it's fairly ambitious actually.