Lol those were all story beats written to carry one mission to the next. You can’t just bash stuff for... happening. I can say the same for Arthur, he would’ve been killed if Abigail didn’t save him from Milton. Arthur also got kidnapped by the O’Driscoll’s, another “obvious trap”. That mission really had no purpose because the story completely forgets about Colm until the end of the game where you do that mission to watch him swing.

That’s one trope I despise about Rockstar’s writing. They always introduce multiple villains in the beginning, usually one or two main ones and a secondary one (Cornwall, Milton, and Colm). GTA games are notorious for this and RDR2 was no different. It shits on the pacing and does nothing other than force filler missions in the game. It’s dumb.