Biggest surprise when you read the book...

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Rorschach beats people up, hoping to make the world a better place according to his self-righteous beliefs. Veidt blows up a city, hoping to make the world a better place according to his self-righteous beliefs. That seems like a difference of scale, more than anything else. Both of them have some impressive qualities, but I wouldn't call either of them heroic.

That entirely depends on whether you are juding the ends only, or are looking at the means as well. Both are arguably trying to make a better world. One is doing so by targetting evil people and stopping them (brutally, to be sure) and making the world better, one bad guy removed at a time. The other is targetting an entire city of random people (most of them innocent of any crime) and killing them all in pursuit of his dream of a better world. That's a whopper of a difference in terms of methodology.

One could argue (and I would) that this is precisely the difference between "hero" and "villian". It's rarely the end result/objective that makes the difference between those two things. It's almost always the means used to do it that is. So yes. Alan Moore's intention or later reaction aside, Rorschach is the "hero" of the story, while Veidt is the "villian". What makes the Watchmen interesting and shocking is that the villain wins, and the hero dies. That's... kinda the point. Which is what makes Moore's later statements about the character all the more surprising (I had never known that to be honest, so yeah... shocking to me since I would assume that was the actual intent of the story).

I'm kinda left wondering what he thought people were supposed to take away from it with if not that. Rorschach, for all his personal faults, is actually treating each individual person in the world around him as an individual person, and judging each based on their own actions. And yeah, applying some extremely harsh justice, but he does actually care about who the people are that he targets. Veidt treats all people as statistics to be manipulated in his own calculation to find "the best world possible", and if that calculation says "this number of people over here have to die to save a greater number overall" he calls that "good". He's making a pretty obvious contrast between those two approaches to "making the world better", but if Moore didn't actually intend to make those points, then he maybe should have written the story and characters differently.

Unless he actually thought people would cheer Veidt as the savior of mankind maybe? Which maybe speaks volumes about his own disconnect with what his audience might actually think about such things. Dunno. Again though, not really super relevant in itself. But to me, what made the story interesting and compelling was that conflict between the ideas of "what makes the world better", and showcasting that neither exreme is a great thing at all. But yeah. If we are forced to choose, it's not surprising that most would choose Rorschach as the more heroic character. A flawed person, trying to do his best to make things better, in a world in which his own individual actions seem small and meaningless, but he continues to try anyway? Yeah... Can't see at all why more people might connect with that character than with Veidt.

Let's not pretend like scale doesn't matter. Killing a person is bad. Killing a million people is roughly a million times worse.

I think who you are killing and why you are killing them, also matters a whole lot. More than the number even.