(even though it strikes me as a mind projection issue of creating a person's ethical 'character' when all you need is the likelihood of them performing this act or that).

This may be part of the reason many virtue ethical theories are prescriptions on what one should do themselves, and usually disapprove of trying to apply it to other human's.On this level, it's poor for predicting, but wonderful for meaningful signalling of cooperative intent. I tend to consider virtue ethics as my low-level compressed version of consequentialist morality; it gives me the ability to develop actions for snap situations that I'd want to take for consequentialist reasons.