Sorry but I still disagree with you.
Octavian did not finally choose to pretend restoring the republic because he had time to mature. He put a formally republican veil on his military monarchy because he finally found that it was an opportune way to marginalize his rival Antony. He wanted a civil war against his rival, so he used caricatural propaganda to depict Antony as the hostage of Cleopatra the witch and to depict his war as a war against an eastern queen.
Only victory proved him right. If Antony had won, everybody would have turned its back to Octavian who would have been depicted as a tyrant who had tormented Italy and who had falsified Caesar’s will in order to become the main heir of the dictator.
Absolutely nobody in the Italian social elite believed in Octavian’s lie about his so-called restoration of the republic. Tacitus is very clear about this : the augustan Princeps had nothing in common with Cicero’s Princeps. The point is that the people were rather happy to have a Princeps that checked the haughty aristocrats and protected them from the excesses of aristocratic competition.
And though Octavian was not born in one of the most prestigious noble families (he clearly was not a Claudius, an Aemilius, a Fabius Maximus, a Valerius, a Scipio, a Metellus or a Domitius), his father was praetor in 61 and governor of Macedonia after his death. Being related by marriage to Caesar and Pompey (his wife Atia was Caesar’s niece and also a distant cousin of Pompey), he had strong prospects of being elected consul, if he had not died in 59.
From 4 years old on, Octavian was raised by his grandmother Julia Caesaris, that is Caesar’s sister, in the decade when Caesar, Pompey and Crassus were the 3 most prominent roman politicians.
So, of Octavian certainly had no respect for the republican system, I draw a very different conclusion from yours about what this absence of respect made him do.
This absence of respect made him reignite a civil war at he age of only 18, when Antony was striving to maintain concord.
It made him betray or have killed any opponent or partisan of his ruthless partisan ambition. He had inherited Caesar’s name, but not Caesar’s clementia and personal charm. Augustus had much more in common with Sulla and Pompey than with Caesar.
And he risked reigniting civil war or reignited it several times until he got rid of Antony.
He was a great machiavelian politician. No doubt about it. But this does not mean that he was the only one who could have held the empire together or find an acceptable political solution to the crisis of the republic just because he happened to do it.