It does. And I largely agree with you, too, what's more.
Though I would say that it succeeds in doing the musical things. It doesn't fail at being a coherent work--it only fails at being a musical analogue of Shakespeare's play.
The successes come at the expense of failing at something else.
[Edit: I thought of something else that almost never gets mentioned about this symphony, the quality of the recordings. This is apparently a difficult work to perform adequately, judging from the plethora of inadequate performances, including several of Davis's, widely known as a huge Berlioz nut. I don't think any recordings do it more justice than Monteux, and the big problem there is that there were two recordings of the same performance, one with really crappy sound and one with surprisingly good sound for its age. (The good one is coupled with Leibowitz's recording of Symphonie fantastique--a peculiar performance. Instructive but not very listenable.) Other than that, I think there may be a couple of decent Davis recordings. The only one I think that really gets it is the one with the Wiener Philharmoniker and Borodina, Moser, and Miles. Other than that, maybe the Muti, of all people. But I don't listen to that one much, so would not go to the mat for it. The Monteux is as close to perfect, musically, as is possible. Sonically? Well, the good one is pretty OK. Nothing like so good as either Davis or Muti, of course.
So there's that. I think you pretty much have to know it in the Monteux performance or you're getting something that doesn't quite come off.
Otherwise, there's the whole thing of doing extracts from it. So of course any of those botched jobs is going to sound incoherent, because it is.]