This is exactly it. They love Rumple when he is power hungry and with magic. They like him as a villain, mainly because Robert Carlyle plays it so well. But they also want to maintain the Beauty and the Beast relationship with Belle. The end result, a complicated, back and forth, contradicting mess with poor old Belle. Unfortunately her character suffers because of what the writers want Rumple to do.
I think that’s exactly right. If this is how Belle were in fact written — and if she had enough screen time to explore these issues — it’d be a genuinely interesting character and love story. But it isn’t — she doesn’t get enough screen time OR attention for all those nuances to come out. Instead, we get an inconsistent mess, made marginally compelling by the fact that RC and EdR have good screen chemistry and are talented actors.
The other issue with the writing is that A&E appear to have a kind of centralized redistributive economy going on with their character arcs. So by wanting Rumple to be villainous again, they also appear to be giving away/reattributing Rumple’s qualities and character “milestones” to other characters (namely Hook). And if the Rumbelle baby is a thing, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the emotional ickiness of the Zelena baby mess gets sort of “transferred” onto Rumbelle, so that Zelena can come out white and fluffy in comparison.
But more broadly, I think the Rumbelle thing is a barometer of the fact that A&E don’t always know where to draw the line. Like they didn’t with Regina and Graham, or with the Zelena/Robin/Regina thing. And like they don’t seem to with CS in this last season. I anticipate they are going to make another morally icky mess of Rumbelle, even more than they have now, because they still think it’s just “good drama.”
But major kudos to EdR for thinking about and trying to make sense of her character, and doing it in a way that’s actually quite interesting. Someone’s gotta do it, and it’s not going to be these writers.