I agree wholeheartedly with everything you had to say except this:
"Oh what the damn hell no. Not even pre-Birds Helena would pull that shit. Even if she were that batshit immoral Punisher dumbfuck nonsense, which she is not and has never been, even at her darkest (like Bruce or Babs would have tolerated her for ten seconds if she were, I mean really), she would have to be possessed of a truly unparalleled stupidity to assume Hugo was playing straight and she'd actually accomplish anything by shooting the dude - hell, it's a huge and unwarranted assumption that that's even the guy Hugo says it is, forget believing that Hugo will actually let the others go."
I think the whole point of Huntress' character arc in BoP was that she was exactly that bad. Which was, I think, the point of Simone's quotation that "The thing about Huntress that I like is, with her, the ‘attitude’ thing that so many characters have isn’t just a pose. Under the right circumstances, she’ll not only cross the line, she’ll put a crossbow bolt through it." I think, moreover, that Simone successfully walked a very fine line in her run on BoP where she managed to avoid having Huntress do anything that would actually make it impossible for Oracle and Canary to work with her, while at the same time not having her go soft. For example, he only reason Huntress didn't kill Sovereign Brusaw was that her crossbow jammed. Also, it seems clear to me that Huntress would have beaten Yasemin to death had Dinah not stopped her.
After all, wasn't the whole point of The Battle Within that Oracle was wrong to try to change Huntress? After all, Batman and Oracle didn't tolerate Huntress for a long time, and in the end, they, especially Oracle, were the ones who changed. And wasn't the whole point of that last conversation between Dinah and Helena on that rooftop when Helena told Dinah that she had a recurring dream about the two of them meeting as children that Helena was saying, in essence, that she wished Dinah had been there to save her when she was being raised to be an assassin the way Dinah had saved Sin from the same fate? Lastly, I like Huntress as at least a borderline sociopath; take that away from her, and she just wouldn't be as interesting to me anymore.
Otherwise, though, I completely agree with you. I think I'm going to post some scans of a better-written Huntress.