It seems like you are saying that the interpretations offered by Bible scholars are attempts to make a text that meant something different once upon a time, mean something palatable now. And that the goal of doing so is to somehow redeem what was originally an unpleasant story, so we don’t have to abandon it as hopelessly archaic and outdated.
But I would argue that is neither what Bible scholars do, nor their goal, at least if we are talking about the Evangelical ones whose ideas I referred to above. The job of Bible scholars is to help us recreate the context and assumptions and background knowledge and expectations of the original author and audience as best we can, and the goal is to uncover as best we can what the original message communicated in that context was. They aren’t re-framing the story so that it means something different now than what it was intended to mean. They are trying to mitigate the cultural baggage we bring to the text and help us avoid inevitable interpretive mistakes that we are bound to make in our ignorance of the original context.
It is an unfair and unrealistic expectation of the biblical text to insist that it should make sense to us with no knowledge of the cognitive environment in which it was originally produced. Obviously, we have to do our homework to get close to the intended meaning.
BioLogos Advisory Council member John Walton has a whole enlightening book,The Lost World of Adam and Eve on understanding the account of Adam and Eve in its ANE cultural context. I dug up some points from Proposition 8 “Forming from the Dust and Building from the Rib” for you, since it was relevant to your assumptions about Eve being somehow created lesser than Adam according to the text.
Earlier in the book, Walton establishes reasons for seeing Genesis 2 as a “sequel” to the corporate creation of humanity in God’s image in Genesis 1 instead of seeing it as a retelling or more detailed account of the sixth day of creation described in Genesis 1.
Was Eve built from Adam’s rib? Walton says, no, because of Adam’s claim that she is “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.” The Hebrew word translated ‘rib’ is used forty some times in the OT and in no other place is it an anatomical term. It usually refers to one side or the other. In Akkadian, a cognate is used to refer to an entire side or entire rib cage, like the English “a side of beef.” The word chosen in early Aramaic and Greek and Latin translations can mean side or rib. In English the word “rib” was selected over “side” with the earliest English translations and the resulting interpretation became entrenched in our translations.
Walton claims the ancient context would have understood God as cutting Adam in half to make Eve. He argues (using ANE lit and lexical studies) that the "deep sleep’ Adam experienced would not have been imagined by the ancients as some sort of anesthesia for divine surgery, but rather, preparation for a divine vision. The point of the vision was to help Adam understand an important reality, the reality of woman’s identity. (As Walton does much of the time, he argues the creation narrative was not to explain “where woman came from,” material origins, but what woman’s function was.) Since Adam and Eve are human archetypes, what is true about Eve would be understood to be true of all women. The narrative sets up the rationale for why an individual would establish a bonded, binding relationship with a biological outsider. Marriage is pictured as recovering an original state of wholeness. So women are not to be seen as mating partners, but as essential allies, as “the other half.” (End summary of Walton’s discussion)
When we understand more about the cognitive environment of the original audience, what we find is a text that elevates the identity of women and the significance of marriage much higher than probably would have been typical in its historical context. It’s not mysogynistic at all. The fact that over the centuries people have read their own sexism and bias into the text is not God’s fault.