How I would have handled Nautilus' lore

So, I received nearly 20 downvotes in another thread for saying that I don't like Nautilus' new lore. I just find the idea that he wants people to throw money into the sea to sate his superstition rather boring, trivial and unsympathetic.

So, I thought to myself, if I was on the narrative team, what would I have done? And I figured that, instead of trying to distance Nautilus from Pyke as the narrative team have done, I would have tried to bring them closer together, so that there was an actual thematic reason why their stories seem so similar.

Here's what I would have done:

The being known as Nautilus was once a naive young pirate called Nat. He had always liked Pyke, but went along with the plan to betray him out of fear for his own safety, as he was regularly bullied by the other crew mates. The night after Pyke had been swallowed up by the sea, Nat found that he couldn't sleep. He was plagued by visions of Pyke drowning, gurgling underwater bubbles as he cried for help. Overcome with guilt at what he had allowed to happen to his old friend, Nat clad himself in a diving suit, and went down into the depths to recover Pyke's body, hoping to give it proper burial rites so that its soul could find peace, and he himself could find forgiveness. Nat searched the sea all night, to no avail. But then, just as he was about to give up, he found Pyke's carcass, drifting toward him in a spectral waltz. Nat realised that the corpse was not dead. The corpse whispered a curse, and Nat found his diving suit tightening around him, permanently sealing him in, dooming him for eternity to suffer the smothering claustrophobia that Pyke himself had been forced to endure. Pyke's living corpse then crossed Nat's name from his list, and vanished, leaving Nat imprisoned inside his armor. Isolated from the outside, he was forced to gaze inwards, and forever comprehend the full horror of what he had done. He tried to return to the surface, but it was too late, he had lost his way and would never again find it. All those years cursed beneath the sea, gazing inwards, changed him into something inhuman. It is said that the creature once known as Nat now wanders aimlessly along the sea bed, still trying to escape the guilt of what it did to Pyke, crushed by regret, and the weight of all that water. If rumors are to be believed, on especially clear nights, when the stars can be used for navigation, the armored monster known as the Nautilus finds its way to the surface, capsizing boats, and dragging sailors down into the depths to aid in the rescue of a man named Pyke, whom it thinks is still drowning...

And that's the gist of it. I don't have time to turn it into a full bio, but I think this idea would have worked much better than the current lore of him wanting people to throw money into the sea, as it would have provided meaning and pathos to Nautilus' motivations, while adding symbolism like crushing water as guilt and a diving suit as loneliness, without detracting from the eerie mystery that originally characterised him.