You do realize that all that you said, and all that Wendy Doniger says can be simultaneously true?

Attempts at a singular interpretation of the Indian epics will always be incomplete. As the late University of Chicago scholar, AK Ramanujan pointed out in his essay 'Three Hundred Ramayanas', these texts were written and rewritten in several historical, political, and geographic contexts. One can think of these different 're-writes' and 'edits' as an inseparable intertwining of threads. It is almost impossible to identify which epoch and political context each part of the Indian epics emerged from.

In short, no single mass of 'traditional understanding' can be considered as benchmarks.

[1] 'The Collected Essays of AK Ramanujan,' Ed. Vinay Dharwadker, Oxford University Press, 2004. http://trans-techresearch.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/thr...