Dracula's dialog at times implies that he still thinks of himself as a sort of hero. Even when he's massacring villages, he still acts like he's doing good, saying that he's sending them all to a better place. So, if Dracula isn't a monster, then why are there all these scrolls and memorials around describing him horrifically torturing people for fun? Simple. In the case of the memorials you find around the city in the present day, those are all propaganda written by Satan's acolytes, intended to make Dracula out to be worse than he actually was. In the case of the Brotherhood's scrolls that litter the castle, almost all of them describe tortures being inflicted not by Dracula, but by his minions, who (as this game repeatedly shows) are all only barely controlled by Dracula if at all. While Dracula was definitely a villain prior to the events of this game, he was never as bad as people thought.
Dracula's use of the memetic "What is a man...but a miserable pile of secrets!" during the tutorial may seem like Pandering to the Base without context at first glance. However, when you look at Roland and the army of Brotherhood knights from his perspective, Dracula could be musing at how the upper echelons of the Brotherhood had most likely created a cover story for Gabriel's "death" after the defeat of the Lords of Shadow (Trevor being the exception in MoF). Even if Roland is a high-ranking commander, he might not had been privy to the truth on Dracula still being God's chosen one, given his reaction when Dracula grabs the cross with no ill-effect, or the prophecy that Gabriel becomes Dracula. Given that official chronology places the tutorial stage in the year AD 1547, 500 years after the first game, and the low life-expectancy back then, the Brotherhood would've had ample time to create and hide their new "pile of secrets" — they are mortal men.
On that subject, of course the giant army failed. No one present was a Belmont, the Vampire Killer was missing, and none of the other tools capable of beating Dracula were created in this timeline. The entire invasion was a doomed idea from the start!
In the secondLords of Shadow game, the stealth sections are almost all disliked, and with the exception of one, they all make sense. The enemies there are supposedly unkillable, but we know that Dracula can take down tougher enemies than this; however, when you first start playing, you're very weak and even Zobek, aka, Death himself is hesitant to face down Satan's Children, the Acolytes, and he knows that he can't match the Big Bad at all. So, even if you could face those bodyguards and win, you might alert the Acolytes that you're running around, and going up against all of them when you're weaker than Zobek? Would make for a very Bad End for everything.
