Perhaps the idea was to make Tony really unlikable but right, and to make Steve really likable but wrong to make it more confusing? You don’t want to agree with Tony but you know he’s right, and you want to agree with Cap but you know he’s wrong. I mean, I definitely agreed with Tony the whole way through, but I also felt a lot of sympathy for Cap’s position (not to get political, but the story often felt like a gun control argument).

In the end the whole deal is kinda Cap’s fault for being so stubbornly unwilling to talk (the What If…? story about what might have happened had he not EMP’d Tony’s armor at the plant certainly frames it that way), and Tony, even though he was right, seems to feel that he was right at the cost of his soul and a lot of his friends (Happy, Pepper, Cap, Peter, Thor [eventually], and a lot more).

Goliath’s funeral was definitely one of Marvel’s signature heavy-handed allegories, especially if you remember the reactions of his family at the funeral.