The childlike thing reminded me of this quote from Jo Slee from Uncut magazine: "I think he has very high expectations of people, and he's very quick to take umbrage, or to feel let down, and you don't often get a second chance. That's childlike. He's very extreme in his emotional reactions to people. He's always been intensely suspicious, actually finding it intensely difficult to trust people. I actually feel like he's been indoctrinated against trusting people at some stage in his life."
There's also a great quote in the same interview, though annoyingly it's credited only to 'an insider': "It goes back [again] to Kenneth Williams. When did he turn off? Did he sit in front of his friends and do that f***ing stupid voice? You put on the mask and the mask becomes the person. There's nothing left except the persona. Morrissey had become a c***. Perhaps he'd always been a c***. But maybe if he wasn't such a c*** he wouldn't have made the brilliant records he did."
And yes, ultimately it is the records that are important here. Everything else is just flimflam, really.