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Your view of Islam is too fixated on mainstream Sunni ideology and argumentation, which makes you mistake the map for the territory. Theologically arguments about Quran and Hadith are interesting but they have a distorting effect if you are trying to deduce whether Islam can be compatible with a fulfilling life.
Islam is ultimately nothing more than a sum of Muslims and their communal practices. In today's world Muslims are often (but not always) in the position of a poor backwards ignored uneducated masses. Even when they move to rich western countries with theoretical equal citizenship they are hardly more than an unwanted minority barely tolerated because the locals don’t want to clean the sewers themselves. So the practice of the religion is heavily influenced by this inferiority complex and backwardness. Muslim populations have a habit of sticking together, fatalism, being wary of outside influences because they instinctively feel that the outsiders will only bring more harm and humiliation. They have a point.
But this wasn’t always the case. When the conditions allowed, Islam in history also acted as a vessel for wildly creative philosophy, cosmopolitanism and intellectual freedom. There are a myriad of ways to work around the limitations of Quran and Hadith. Quran is quiet an obtuse text and there are a million trillion Hadith with contradictory opinions. This is a religious tradition that created as divergent streams as Sufism and Salafism for this exact purpose.
I am also an ex-Muslim by the way. But over time I got to recognise my rejection was more based on a feeling of class superiority than any deeper inquiry. That’s how Turkey works unfortunately and I don’t plan to abandon my social class anytime soon. But I also recognise that if the economic and political currents change Islam is more than capable of once again becoming a religion of good life and progress instead of the current bigoted mess.
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