Yeah. From how I understand web novels are more conducive to immediate ideas without participation of editors or others to discuss what may be too strong or weak and what may shift things from just a reactive person who attacks those that attack him to a bigot with an agenda against certain demographics. It can be difficult to maintain action and drama big enough to draw readers while keeping the balance in the characters' reactions, especially if you're doing it serially with a fairly quick pace. Depending on how quickly the author publishes it could amount to the first draft that I've heard American authors constantly advise aspiring writers to throw immediately in the trash. Light novels then involve going back over all this and reexamining it, finding plot kinks that developed and characterization mistakes, enhancing things that need emphasis and toning down things that came across too strongly. Each further adaptation continues this trend, making adjustments sometimes to fix or improve things and sometimes to just make it more suited to the specific medium. Even then things can be kept that shouldn't (I mean, I doubt the author of SAO actually fantasizes about raping women, he probably just felt it was a good way to make people hate the villains). The anime has done well in some areas and poorly in others, but overall I like it.
And yeah, the manga and LN give a much better look at the heroes. Each is supposed to show a certain "virtue" carried to a level or direction that makes it anything but virtuous.