Big agree with Luna, Danya, and Jake here, and I'm gonna start by hyping up the Epilogues and ending with how I rekindled my love for Homestuck, and how you can too even if you don't want to like the Epilogues.

I think what I understand as a bit of a throughline on your issues with it is that you're kind of wanting... a more traditional story from Homestuck/post-canon? Especially where you said you thought the Epilogues should be a tapering off of the story, wrapping things up and making us feel good about knowing all the mysteries and feeling like the characters are Done. We can nod to ourselves and think about how every main character has now become their Final Self, where they're happy and healthy. But not only is that not the kind of story Homestuck is, that's not what the Epilogues were for.

IMO you can read the Epilogues in two different ways depending on how interesting you find them (though of course both work together). You can read them as something that Hussie did to shake fans out of a stupor of being addicted to Canon and reading Hussie's writing as the only thing that matters (which ties into a lot of wanting to know the minutiae of how X or Y thing happened). Basically if they were expecting a Happy Ending from Homestuck of all things it would wake fans up and destabilize the "happily ever after" vibes the fandom and fanon was basking in. Because let's be real, we're seeing a lot of compelling reasons why that was never going to happen either way. Homestuck is a meta story about stories, but also video games. What happens when you win the game, but it doesn't feel like winning? What happens when you die as a child, and don't know how to live normally after your world ended then?

The second reading of the Epilogues is how you can read it now in combination with HS2 and HS:BC, as something that's supposed to act as a bridge to a different kind of Homestuck. Read if you want to, ignore if you want to finish off Homestuck as a YA instead of an Adult story. Fanfics are going to be labelling themselves as "Epilogues compliant" or not so you'll be able to filter them out. But the story is still going. Why would the Epilogues wrap things up when their purpose is to get us ready for a continuation? HS:BC has already made a bunch of shit from the Epilogues pay off IMO, and is doing really interesting things with these characters. When it first got started it took me a bit to realize that I read so much fanon and so much meta, even, that was acting as if Homestuck was going to finish with a clean victory and happy ending. We were wrong though, c'est la vie.

I've been able to really rekindle my love for Homestuck (that started waning after the HS2 team got harassed out of the project) by seeing the work that people have kept doing, and especially the ones that really use the Epilogues as a building block. Obviously I love SpicyYeti's work as a whole but I think Jade Route REALLY sold it all to me. It filled in a lot of the gaps that reading the Epilogues as prose versus the usual webcomic picture format left, and bridged the distance of how I remembered these crazy kids to their crazy adult selves. They're the same character, but we have to remember that things that are quirky and cute as kids... can really stop being such when they're adults that now have authority and power. It can sour quickly without them even realizing. Like even for Jane, you have to remember that Jane thinks she's doing the right thing!

If you want to make peace with the Eps being "canon," I think reading some Epilogues fanfic might help you see how other people are interpreting the "character" side of things, especially if a lot of your fandom recently was reading mainline HS fic. I also think that it would help to relax a little bit about what I call "fandom stocks." When something becomes canon, the fandom will surge toward it and start making work about it more than noncanon things. And it can be annoying if it's something you don't like, but there are still die hard ANYTHING fans these days even still in the fandom. There are absolutely plenty of fans that are going to just not read the Epilogues.

If you've ever been into Marvel/DC Comics, if you really just can't rock with the new stuff, you can see HS similarly as a whole through the lens of canon being whatever the current run is (regardless of how contradictory it feels to previous runs), but there being so much previous work that most fans pick and choose what they actually care about. Yeah popularity is gonna change but that's just new fanwork. You can still enjoy your old fanwork. And if you really support the fans making stuff the way you enjoy it, they'll continue to make it!

TLDR: Read Jade Route and engage with other fans that have similar interests as you. Create your golden land.