That said, East Germany was extremely flawed and needed large democratic reforms if it was ever to function. Maybe Germany simply was to broken to ever function as a country after WW2 in any shape or form.
It actually didn't need a democratic reform. Single party systems are fine. They just had to get rid of Marxism, because it Marxism is insane and Marxists can never admit when their progressive nonsense didn't work.
The form of government is almost irrelevant as long as it's not liberal democracy. It's a system that favors almost exclusively the most subversive groups.
China basically proved that if you do Perestroika right, there is no need for Glasnost. Also, West Germany was never meant to be anything but a strong satellite state. Whatever Germany's system is doesn't really matter, because functionally, it's a US outpost with some minor privileges in domestic policy. Very minor.
People tend to overemphasize the form of politics relative to its content. You can have a king, a lifetime president/phancellor, and it can all go well if they are Christians or at least traditional nationalists, and it all goes in the toilet if there are shidlibs in those positions.
Parliamentary democracy is really the only exception because it's the only system that makes an ideological crisis the default state of society, which is ridiculous. You cannot have parliamentary democracy without paying people for being useless interlopers.
I think you are correct about Eastern Germany having more national pride, but I think that's mainly because Stalin, for all his faults, was a sort of ethno-pluralist and removed Trotzkyite/Talmudic influence from the major power nodes. Those people then went into the West and that's how the role switch happened.