The gods are often such dickheads, it makes me suspect that a lot of those stories were really some sort of ancient version of fan-fiction/satire-parody, more or less along the lines of Reynard the Fox, or pretty much anything today where supernaturals or other not-quite-human stand-ins make fun of actual people in power and the systems that be .. ie, same old political bitching via entertainment that we get now, only today it's superheroes, Star Wars and Zootopia.