Ultimately, the fact of the matter is that there’s a profound difference between taking some liberties while adapting a story and completely changing the characters and themes of said story as a supposed adaptation. Jesus Christ Superstar works as an “adaptation” of the gospels because a) it does not pretend to be a faithful adaptation, but rather a play on the original story; b) it’s different in many ways, but the core of the story remains the same: it deals with themes of faith, mystery and contemplation of a higher will, predestination and free will, the relationship between humanity and the divine; it differs in its elaboration of those themes from the original, and introduces some new elements, but it’s still ultimately a story about those themes, and the characters — although explored in different ways — are still the same characters at their core.
Just like you can’t write a Jesus that is unforgiving, or a Judas that doesn’t betray Jesus in the end, you can’t write an Odysseus that’s not cunning and deceitful and full of hubris. Those are the traits that make him Odysseus. You can give him PTSD from the Trojan war, sure; you can explore the complexities of his character and any guilt he might feel about his actions, and still have him feel like Odysseus; I think the novel Circe by Madeline Miller does it fairly well, for instance. But you can’t write an Odysseus who is a good, honest, straightforward man trying to grapple with his war crimes, simply because that is not Odysseus. And in the same vein, if you want to write a take on the Odyssey but you want to forgo all exploration of the original themes and concepts in favour of your own ideas, it would be worth it to look for a different epic poem that might be a better base for your ambitions.
Look, I’m not the adaptation police. I’ve read plenty of stories that completely subverted the core of the respective original works and I’ve loved them to bits; but there has to be a clear connection between the story and the subsequent take on the story, or it doesn’t work. You can’t just write your original work with specific themes and characters, slap some familiar names on it and call it an Odyssey, and people are allowed to say so.
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