interesting background on Rand, thank you. From your descriptions, if you're right in your assertions, it seems as if her fiction has been hijacked by dismal extreme libertarians taking characters as if they are paragons of virtue, rather than problematic examples.
Not to disagree with you, but to put a finer point on it...
I feel like the characters are not "paragons of virtue" because they are not meant to be imitated. That is a common mistake by both fans and detractors of Rand. Nor are the characters meant to be representations of abstract ideas. They are just characters, complex ones. But like any good writer---say Hugo or Dostoevsky---the author is putting part of himself or herself into the characters and thus the characters have a morality to them that reflects the views of the author.
I feel like calling the characters "problematic examples" may be overstating it a bit. For example, Jean Valjean in Les Miserables is a heroic character who has a character arc where he learns from his mistakes and his character becomes more heroic over time. Rand's "good" characters are like that. Her "neutral" or "bad" characters don't learn from their mistakes. (edit: Well, some of the relatively neutral ones actually do, and have positive arcs.)
FYI, Rand hated libertarians and rejected libertarianism.
Still, a lot of libertarians claim to like her, and don't understand that their political views resemble only a small subset of her overall philosophy---and even then, it's more of a resemblance than actual agreement.
