I rather liked that LaCroix was the pathetic sort - you know he's a total pussy, and everyone else knows he's a total pussy, but he just happens to have all the power and nobody else can do shit about it. I went with the Camarilla ending the first time I played through, and you think that there's going to be this buildup where you finally get back at him for everything (because at that point you'd been gunning down a shitload of trash mobs), but no... he just falls to his knees and starts sobbing and rambling with all these rationalizations of how the city needs him. I thought that was well-done.
It's a cool story idea to have a self-seving prince that only uses his position for personal and vain reasons, but Lacroix is too poor of a character to carry that idea. They didn't do a good job at justifying this pathetic dude to be on the position he is, nobody supports or even respects the guy so what the hell is his power base?
I didn't find that to be a problem. Smiling Jack sums it up quite well if you push him on why the anarchs haven't managed to take LaCroix down yet, and he warns you that he'd never say LaCroix was stupid - just 'middle management'. It's established that he managed to win a series of victories against the anarchs, putting pressure on them to the point that a bunch of them swapped sides. He's blinded by ambition, but he's also a devious bastard: defusing Nine's little protest by making a showcase of 'Camarilla leniency' in sparing the player, then using the player's debt to him as leverage to send him to what would ordinarily be certain death (getting the Sabat to do something that would have been politically damaging if he did it personally) is typical of what you get from him during the game - he's a pussy, but he's also a skilled politician and manipulator. Jack traps him by playing to LaCroix's political instincts; he might be a pussy, but it isn't weakness or stupidity that brings him down.
It's also fairly clear that he's not exactly a pushover even without his political manipulations. From the info you get regarding LaCroix's history with Bach's family, you can put together that he started off as a minor noble (both in birth and as a vampire) - not high up enough that you'd expect him to get a Princedom. He then disappeared and travelled through Africa for the best part of 200 years, where he met the thing that's his sheriff, before returning to the civilised world and using his alliance with the sheriff to rise up the Ventrue ranks. It's quite clear that the sheriff is a very large part of what enabled LaCroix to get the title of Prince and then turn the tide against the Anarchs - nobody else in the game wants to fuck with the sheriff. In turn, LaCroix provides the brains and politics - without him, the sheriff would either be a frontline grunt somewhere, or would still be in the middle of Africa.
He's a pussy, and it's nice that the game doesn't do the ol' 'here's the most dangerous villain that ever villained a villainous villaining'. But Jack's phrase 'middle management' (and his warning that he'd never call LaCroix stupid) sums him up - he's an ambitious and relatively young go-getter, and his skills lie in politics rather than governance, but he's still devious enough to be a threat. He's a pussy, but that never actually turns into a weakness for him. By the end of the game he's manipulated events so that his main rival is near-dead via werewolf and the subject of a blood hunt (and it's only a bizarre stroke of luck that Nines survives the werewolves when LaCroix lights up the fires to attract them) - the anarchs are thoroughly screwed, his non-pussy rival is dying or dead and he's played the Anarchs, Kuejin and Sabat off each other masterfully, using each to do jobs that he couldn't have done himself. It's not his pussyness that brings him down, it's his political ambition. LaCroix rose through politics, he consistently comes out on top during the game when tackling his rivals via politics, and gets defeated when Jack dangles in front of him a means of leaping from 'middle management' to true power, enticing him out from the Camarilla political game that LaCroix plays well.
though and I agree with conclusion; You can't make game which will be both popular with Manboons thus profitable for 
Evul Producers and 
.
