I just can't like Lady Eboshi

Before you go all "You just didn't understand the movie" on me, let me state that I know what the movie was trying to say. I'm saying it failed in delivering its message.

Eboshi wants to provide for her people, right? And the way she plans on doing that is depleting all their resources, which will do more harm than good in the long term. If you hack down the entire forest and mine all the mountains, what's left? They'll all die slowly and painfully without the resources they've come to depend on.

Not only that, she's a walking embodiment of colonialist self-entitlement. She has no qualms about seizing and occupying land that isn't hers and killing its natives (the animals). You might say her interests were humanitarian, but I beg to differ. She only recruited people willing to serve her. Of course society's outcasts would pledge loyalty to the first person who threw them a bone. Her main objective was manufacturing firearms to further her imperialist agenda.

We as the audience are supposed to believe that San and Eboshi shouldn't hate each other because hatred is destructive and war solves nothing. We're supposed to think both of them are partly right and partly wrong. Again, this message falls flat because San is completely justified in hating Eboshi. If someone invaded your home, destroyed it, and took whatever they wanted, wouldn't you hate them too? No matter what Eboshi's motives were, her actions were 100% wrong. San acted to defend her home. Where's the wrongdoing there?

The message we were supposed to take away is that the preservation of nature vs. the progression of human civilization isn't as black and white as we think. But Eboshi is so unlikable and her actions are so destructive that I saw San as the hero and Eboshi as the villain. If the movie wanted to take a balanced approach, it shouldn't have made Eboshi so vile.