While I largely agree with you,

>In the end the stuck up Royals fucked up the country by inviting the Japanese to deal with the Peasant uprising

There's a lot to unpack here too... I wrote a very long piece about this period which I'll post later. Actually the one who was the most anti-Japanese was Queen Myeongseong (commonly called "Empress Myeongseong" but I think that's a bit inflated title), who was the most influential politician in Joseon court back then. Her role and personality in that period is vastly underevaluated by later Korean historians, perhaps because of Confucianism-influenced gender bias.

She was consistently anti-Japan perhaps because she knew that Japan would be the biggest geopolitical threat to Korea. That's why she first allied with Qing China, and as soon as Qing lost the Sino-Japanese war, she immediately moved to ally with Russians. That was the point Japan decided to murder her (unnecessarily violently).

• Both Qing and Japan intervened the peasant uprising, and the queen was pro-Qing and some aristocratic faction was pro-Japan. This was the major cause of the Sino-Japanese war in which Japan defeated China. Right after this the queen tried to ally with Russians, the Japanese murdered her and had the Russian diplomats literally see her mutilated body as a warning. I think the symbolic and political significance (and the level of violence) of this event is not as much discussed as it needs.

King Gojong, who was her supportive husband (and the one who benefited the most from her political shrewdness), had been personally quite friendly with the emerging pro-Japan faction among the aristocracy. However, after having to let his wife violently murdered by the Japanese, he got deeply depressed, and after a few months he suddenly moved his residence into the Russian embassy, and kicked out all the major members of the pro-Japan faction.

So the Korean royalty pretty much resisted Japan's influence. There were quite many pro-Japan aristocrats but they lost influence after the queen's murder. It was when Russia was defeated by Japan (1905) that Korea couldn't resist the Imperial Japan's power anymore. Right after Japan won the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese army encircled the Korean palace, and Japanese prime minister (or its equivalent - Ito Hirobumi) walked into the Korean palace and made the Joseon court sign a protectorate treaty (Eulsa treaty). King refused to sign it himself, but some of the court high officials did. That was the de facto end of Korea as an independent political entity.