I'm sorry and appreciate your nuanced response, thank you for taking the time to explain.

For my part, I played generally low chaos just because I found it very fun to blink in, knock out a guard on their own, blink away and end up with all the guards in piles up in the rafters, on the chandelers, stuffed into corners of closets etc lmao. I haven't replayed 1 in a couple years but I think all the main targets have non-lethal as an option and generally require some set up to achieve which gives more time for world exploring. There are also a lot of powers that work very well with non-lethal and more stealth oriented play throughs.

Like the other commentor pointed out, the guard and good amount of the general folk are not really enemies because they are "bad", they're simply manipulated by propaganda and think Corvo is the one who murdered the empress in cold blood. So from a bystanders prospective, the boatman in this case, he's seeing a high chaos player murder a bunch of at least morally neutral guards and is understandably disgusted. For high chaos you'd definitely have to kill a good percentage of the guards as, from my understanding, you can still kill every target and achieve a low chaos ending. Corvo is given the choice to do what's needed, but at a point it's more like a slaughter and the characters are effected by it. Not to mention murdering the majority of the police and leadership of an empire is going to throw an already strained empire into... Chaos has. Not enough guards left to keep the peace. It felt less to me (in high chaos runs) like the game is chastizing me, and more like understandable consequences to my annihilation tactics lol, more rats because of all the bodies, characters becoming disillusioned and turning away, the guards absolutely know I'm a monster now, etc..

You indicated you felt the tools you were given pushed you more towards a lethal playstyle, however what about the non lethal tools you were given? There's a stun mine, sleep bolts, ability to choke guards unconcious, several powers as I mentioned... Plus you get to choose what you upgrade, most runs I didn't upgrade the lethal options much at all. 🤷

Idk, I went in expecting a stealth game and it overdelivered and had the bonus of also being open to a less stealth oriented call of duty or dark souls style kill all in your way option with a bunch of completely different powers I didn't use on my stealth run.

Reading your experience it feels like you might have gone in with a different mindset or maybe misundertstood something about how you can play the game and that it clouded your experience with a game I so thoroughly enjoyed, It's one of those I go back and play every few years.

It's silly that I pushed so much on it because of course in the grand scheme it doesn't matter lol its just a videogame, but eh.

Edit: My wife pointed out to me there's some additional moral points around how the Outsider basically tempts you with power just to see if you'll succumb to the "easy route" with the lethal powers. It is kind of the point that it's harder to do/be morally good in ethically complex situations.