"This is how translations ought to be, in my view - as close to a transliteration as possible without being grammatically incomprehensible."
Butler is emphatically not this, though - It's a prose adaptation of a poem, and thus quite far from a "transliteration" compared to e.g. Fagles, Lattimore, Fitzgerald, etc.
I'd argue that Butler is absolutely a "translation aiming to meet readers in their comfort zones."
From the preface to Butler's Iliad: "It follows that a translation should depart hardly at all from the modes of speech current in the translator's own times, inasmuch as nothing is readable, for long, which affects any other diction than that of the age in which it is written." (source: https://ia600209.us.archive.org/10/items/cu31924026468417/cu...)
The modern style of translations-as-rewrites that aim to meet readers in their comfort zones are terrible, the literary equivalent of shitty dub tracks on foreign video media.