Roddenberry was a human being. Deeply flawed, like most of us. Among other things, he was obsessed with (as a friend of mine once put it about somebody entirely different) "getting his pee-pee wet." And he was a world-class chiseler, writing all-but-unsingable lyrics to the Star Trek theme for the sake of getting a piece of the royalties, and eventually disregarding the enormous contributions made by Coon, Fontana, Solow, Justman, and the cast members and freelance screenwriters themselves.
But he was also a genius, with a profoundly optimistic vision, and an idea for getting meaningful stories past the network censors, and an ability to get very good people working for him. And he started a franchise that has spread that optimistic vision to an extent no other has, despite cancellations, and despite repeatedly waxing and waning in popularity.
One of the churches I attend had a recent clergy crisis. The rector was found to have had his hand in the collection plate for almost his entire tenure, and he was found to have had a history of that. This revelation did much to explain how somebody originally ordained a Nazarene elder ended up as an Episcopal priest. The revelation traumatized most of the congregation. Personally, I was actually relieved: for some reason, any time I was one-on-one with him, I kept hearing Marina Sirtis in the back of my mind, uttering Troi's cliche'd line, "He's hiding something." He could have been hiding far worse. At any rate, I bring up this defrocked-for-life priest because for all his faults, he preached many excellent sermons, and attracted and retained many superb associate priests.
As to that Khan line ("Go! . . . Or stay, but do it because it is what you WISH to do.") always sounded to me like he was entirely aware that he was a sexist and an "augment-ist," and was consciously struggling with his own tendencies because he genuinely cared for McGivers, in a way he'd never cared about anybody before.
