After four years of war, German occupation including like in WWII forcible impression of the labor of the rest of Europe to make up for domestic German shortfalls, the wholesale destruction of French industrial areas in a deliberate process, the attempts as per the dismemberment of Serbia, Montenegro, Romania, and Russia to clearly aim for a Germany in control of a servile Europe, there's no "mild" peace that's possible. And given the wholesale dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and the attempt to outright destroy the Turkish people in Sevres, German whining over Versailles was never convincing and seemed more a bullshit artist type thing than a genuine complaint. Not to mention the only somewhat less draconian Treaties of Trianon and St. Germain.
Not that any of it really matters.
The problem about Versailles was not that it was unjust - how many peace treaties aren't in one way or another? - but that it required a degree of "policing" - troops on the Rhine, military interventions to enforce reparations payments, etc etc - which the war weary inhabitants of the victor countries would never be willing to do for any length of time.
Since, for the reasons you list above, a lenient peace was politically impossible, the virtually inevitable result was a "tough" peace which would then go unenforced. Enforcing it required more effort than anyone felt like making, so when the Germans complained of its injustice, there was a predisposition to believe them, since that provided an honourable excuse for
not making the effort to enforce it. And the rest, of course, is history.
It's a lot like Southern complaints about the horrors of Reconstruction. These too varied from the exaggerated to the downright false, but once Northerners got tired of policing the South, it suited them to believe the Southern version, since doing so gave them an excuse to retreat - which was what they wanted to do.