Struggling with Paul's letters

I'm doing a deep reread of the bible and I'm struggling with a lot of the letters from Paul.

It's because the words of Jesus and John the Baptist as well as their lifestyle seem to be clearly from Kingdom Mentality. They didn't come to change world order or defeat the Romans, but to focus on the heart.

Pauls letters though seem to be so of this world to me though. While there are some beautiful passages where he points toward love and salvation by grace over law, there are some other very legalistic passages. Passages about judging, ostracizing in churches, order of talking, proper behavior.

Although I understand that he has a lot of churches to run and order is needed particularly for new gentile christians, and you can't just preach love your neighbor and expect everything to work out, it feels like such a man-made approach to solving problems. Like he preaches stuff as this is the way just to solve a chaos problem at that time. It feels a lot like some churches nowadays maybe, and so different from the spirit movement of Jesus.

Maybe it was God's timing, like you have a time for kingdom mentality sowing, and then you have a time for physically building. You use carpenters and fishermen, and then you use a knowledgeable pharisee of the law.

But I can't seem to appreciate the latter portion as much, any thoughts or people who really like Pauls teaching can provide insight?