If he had just taught his as theoretical - which the Pope asked him to do in Dialogues, then there wouldn't have been an issue any more than there was for Copernicus.

I quoted to you the actual injunction by the Inquisition against Galileo from 1616. They don't ask him to treat his ideas as a hypothesis. They tell him that he is wrong, that his ideas are heretical, and that he is forbidden from believing in them, teaching them, discussing them, or investigating them. They weren't cautioning him that a better theory existed. They were declaring Geocentrism true, Heliocentrism false and heretical, and demanding that Galileo stop all work on and discussion of Heliocentrism.

but Galileo would've likely gotten off a lot better if he hadn't been so caustic toward people trying to help him and stopped so desperately trying to push off his then-unprovable theory as fact when a - at the time- sounder theory existed.

After Galileo's observations, Heliocentrism was on much sounder footing than Geocentrism. Even Tycho's model, which Galileo rightly viewed as an unwieldy and inelegant attempt to salvage Aristotelian physics, could only accommodate certain telescopic observations (like the way in which sunspots travel across the surface of the Sun) with additional complications - either by accepting that the Earth itself rotates, or by introducing additional complications to the motions of celestial bodies. But Galileo's telescopic observations fell nicely in line with what Heliocentric models predicted. He had a right, as he did, to make his scientific case. I don't see how you can call his attempts desperate, as he had the better empirical backing, and for the most part, made reasonable (and correct) arguments in support of Heliocentrism. If anything is desperate, I would say it's banning someone from believing, talking about, teaching or researching a subject, and then threatening them with torture when they publish a treatise advancing their ideas.