I've been keeping an eye on this because I can't help myself. So I have one question. Do you really not see how having the leader of a cause and the one with a connection to a main character, thus much more important to viewers than the others, be a piece of shit is doing much more than creating shades of grey? It's why people tend to worry a lot about who might be considered/viewed as the representative or voice of a group, because certain things make it very hard for lots of people to agree with what a "tainted person" says. By having an evil person be the face of a cause, a creator is making any support for it come with support for a bad person and thus makes it gross to support, say, an extreme stance on Faunus rights in RWBY. Because supporting that means connecting yourself to the Adam character's faction.
Also, when it comes to fiction, lots of people tend to care about the narrative importance of characters. What is going on between main characters and their connected characters matters more to viewers than what secondary or less important characters do. In that sense, Adam or similar characters in fiction like Karli in Falcon just matter more to viewers. So what they're like matters more to the cause they're connected to than other characters.
If you want to create actual moral greyness in a cause, in my opinion, you need to first make sure the outright bad actors aren't in a position where they are the face of it to viewers. They could have their own faction or group, but don't make them so important that they taint everyone else too much by association. To get the kind of shades of grey that you have in real life, you need to recreate the other types of members that would exist alongside a Adam type and have them have the narrative presence that would give them the weight in the story equal to their real life status verses the Adam type bad actors. That would mean, for example, having multiple narratively meaningful characters who have the different stances that exist towards them like "this guy x sucks, but we can't get rid of him because of what he contributes" or "I don't want to accept that guy x might be bad" or "I want to have nothing to do with guy X and want to get rid of him, but I lack the ability to do so because no one can actually do that". Make sure that it's clear that the outright unsupportable part isn't made equal or superior in narrative presence to the grey side that are doing/believing things that have moral complexity, such as working with the Adam character. It would be preferable to have that sort of actually morally grey character be in charge of a white fang type faction, a character who could be in a story line looking at those bad actors in the complex area of how to respond to them. There's be room for viewers to take different stances on the matter and choose to support either the white fang leader, their opponent such a Blake character connected to them or form their own stance. That's not possible when the leader figure/most important figure of the extreme group is someone written to be flat out bad. Once you have that, you're stuck either headcannoning or with an obvious right side that hurts any sort of support for the extreme faction or of their cause.
This is just me rambling and venting out some thoughts. Hopefully, it makes sense.
