"An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise"

It really does seem to me like Dante was a very thoughtful person. He was a genius. Everything he wrote carried some form of metaphorical or symbolic weight, and everything and everyone he put in there was put in there for a reason. Now obviously, some of the people were probably put in there as some sort of personal vendetta, and were only placed in various places because Dante did not like them much. But even those people still carried some meaningful weight in their placement in the various parts of hell. And all the people he placed in hell for things they actually did, one would have to be a madman to blatantly condemn so many powerful people. And yet Dante did, and everything he said about them was accurate, and Dante carried his intelligence such that he could justify the placement of various people in hell to the very letter. He was not afraid of the people he put in hell, and was proud and confident in his choices.
Also, the imagination that went into the entire inferno was awesome. Dante was essentially the first person to create a visual for hell. Before him, hell was just an abstract location, but after Dante, the entire landscape of the afterlife was laid out in so much detail that essentially every portrayal in every religion and culture of a hellish or evil-barren afterlife place has been the Dante model. The complicated organization, with all the intricate layers and sections all precisely laid out had to have been planned so diligently and intimately. The design, with the concentric rings all going further down into the depths is genius, with the image of almost a tooth or blade digging into the earth, and then coming out the other side into Purgatorio and Paradiso is great. The detail Dante goes into while describing the landscape, the people, the sights, the sounds, the tortures, is haunting while at the same time enticing. He created an entire world to mirror the evil of this world, and contained in such a place with such detail that no one has questioned it since.