And yet for every one of these sadists, a Viktor Frankl pops up to say "“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I'd pull a nihilist into my lifeboat. I wouldn't be happy about it, though. If I had to choose Viktor Frankl or a nihilist, I'd choose Viktor Frankl. I wouldn't be happy about that either.

Pain is objectively bad. Even if in a greater moral system pain is necessary to balance things and so is "good" in that sense, even then it would be a necessary evil. (keyword evil) If there were a way without it, that would be better.

Pain is just a way that animals experience strong motivation. People born without the ability to feel pain have serious problems, because they don't make enough effort to avoid damage.