> all signs indicate gravity can not be successfully described as a quantum fieldThat's not quite correct. The quantum field theory of a massless spin-2 field was developed in the 1960s and 1970s and is perfectly well-defined. The problem with it then was that it is not renormalizable; but today basically all QFTs are viewed as effective field theories anyway, which means not being renormalizable is not a showstopper.
The real issue is that we have no prospect of measuring any quantum aspects of gravity now or in the foreseeable future, so there is no way to test the QFT that has been developed against experiment.
> Gravity has properties such as having its interaction strength grow with the amount of charge (energy), which is very different from the forces described by quantum fields that have constant interaction strength.
This is not correct either. The coupling constant of the massless spin-2 field is just Newton's gravitational constant (modulo some constant factors that depend on your units). The fact that the total interaction in a specific case varies with energy is no different from the fact that the total EM force between two charged objects varies with the charge. Energy is the source for gravity just as charge is the source for EM; the source is not the same as the coupling constant.
> To get antigravity, you need to find a way to have negative energy without it making the vacuum unstable.
Agreed. And as far as we know that is not possible.
> All this suggests gravity is not a fundamental force
This is quite possible, yes, but even if it were true it would not necessarily make the spin-2 massless QFT I referred to above invalid; it would just make it an effective theory that emerges from whatever is the next level down. (Which, as I noted above, is basically how we view all QFTs today anyway, including the Standard Model of particle physics.)
> The closest to an "antigravity" in general relativity is the cosmological constant, thought to explain dark energy. Its tiny (10^-122) positive value behaves like a constant negative energy attributed to the vacuum itself, driving the exponential expansion of space.
No, a positive CC does not have negative energy. It has positive energy and negative pressure. The effective source in the Friedmann equation is the energy density plus three times the pressure, which for a positive CC is negative (because the negative pressure outweighs the positive energy density).