In my post yesterday, I concluded with the following statement:
After writing this, I stopped and asked myself why I stick around (now that the novelty should have worn well off). One reason is that I’ve always had the sense that Judaism understands human nature better than other religions, and has developed a system for guiding people to right and better behavior that is achievable for the average flawed human being without making excuses for weakness or vice or baser instincts. But I’ve never been successful in finding a way to describe this.
And then I surfed over to Ilana-Davita’s blog, where I serendipitously found the answer I was looking for. She links to an article from Azure magazine by its editor, David Hazony, which discusses in detail “Why Judaism Has Laws.” With great clarity, Hazony distinguishes the Jewish embrace of laws governing behavior from the non-Jewish preference for good thoughts and intentions. Here is an excerpt from Hazony’s introductory section:
almost everything else. And we have been taught to think that even to speak of moral laws is somehow a threat to the foundations of what we today consider to be the model of a normal, responsible person. The idea that the individual should subordinate his or her daily life to a set of rules and standards that are defined by a tradition—that is from without, rather than from one’s own understanding of right and wrong—seems to run counter to what modern life is all about.But given the moral record of the Western world during the last century, we might want to leave ourselves room to reconsider. I think it is obvious that in the twentieth century, something went very wrong with Western morality. This was a century that opened with many believing that war was a thing of the past. But instead, dutiful, educated, supremely modern people who read Shakespeare and listened to Mozart embarked on horrific campaigns that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of innocents. In the wake of World War I, the Holocaust, and the Gulag, it is hard to avoid the feeling that while Western civilization may excel at making people prosperous and physically healthy, it is still far from knowing how to make people good. A parallel advancement in morality is, it seems, beyond our reach.
In simplified terms, doing “the right thing” is an obligation rather than an option. It takes on the role of defining one’s relationship to God, one’s community and, by extension, oneself. Hazony describes this as follows:
This is why I stick around. Why do you?
Shimshonit 
You say “One reason is that I’ve always had the sense that Judaism understands human nature better than other religions, and has developed a system for guiding people to right and better behavior that is achievable for the average flawed human being without making excuses for weakness or vice or baser instincts.”
This is actually a central thesis of Rabbi Dr. Leo Adler’s “The Biblical View of Man”, whose central thesis is that Judaism lies between Hellenism’s haughty over-exaltation of the intellect and man’s ability to redeem himself, and Christianity’s resigned submission to man’s sinful nature.
Much of Adler’s ground is covered similarly in parts of Rabbi Dr. Eliezer Berkovits’s “God, Man, and History”. Speaking of whom, Rabbi Berkovits is the primary source for what Hazony writes in the essay you cite.
It is interesting that Adler grew up in a Germany Orthodoxy dominated by the teachings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, while Berkovits was a student of Rabbi Yehiel Yaakov Weinberg, the renowned foremost expert on all that is Hirschian.