If it's any consolation to you, I've no interest in putting Avon through any gratuitous suffering - though I might have different ideas of what would make him happy. ;-) But since I think that they are all tragic characters to some extent, getting any one of them into a better place than where they are seems likely to have to deal with a little misery along the way, on way or another.

It's funny though...I agree this fandom is Avon-oriented (unsurprisingly, since he and Vila are the only ones to stay throughout, and the show itself likes to focus more on Avon than on Vila) but at least in the small fraction of it that I've explored so far I've noticed no particular preference in who gets the more hero-worship. (I think I may have mostly read newer stuff, so perhaps trends have changed recently?) When it comes to excessive rationalisations to explain someone's actions, I've noticed at least as much when it concerns Blake, and perhaps for Vila too, if compensating for the fact that he gets less fic overall (and presents us with far less upsetting ethics).

Sorting out the mechanisms behind why a character acts in a certain way is, at least for me, one of the reasons behind writing fanfic. But while doing that, particularly for a character that one likes, there is always the risk of getting fuzzy about the difference between reasons and excuses - as much so for the readers as for the authors, I suspect.