What I wrote concerned giving up on caring about suffering, which is very closely related with utilitarianism

Its not obvious that utilitarians have cornered the market in caring. For instance, when Bob Geldof launched Band Aid, he used the phrase "categorical imperative", which comes from Kantian deontology.

I think there are other approaches that do better than utilitarianism at its weak areas.

Maybe according to your core intuitions, but not for me as far as I know.

Its not intuition in my case: I know that certain questions have answers, because I have answered them in the course of the hybrid theory I am working on.

ETA

But my main point was that deontology is too vague for a theory that specifies how you would want to act in every possible situation,

Its still not clear what you are saying, or why it is true. As a metaethical theory it doesn't completely specify an object level ethics, but that's normal .. the metaethical claim of virtue ethics, that the good is the virtuous, doesn't specify any concrete virtues. Utilitarianism is exceptional in that the metaethics specifies the object level ethics.

Or you might mean that deontological ethics is too vague in practice. But then, as before, add more rules. There's no meta rule that limits to you ten to rather than ten thousand rules.

Or you might mean that deontological ethics can't match consequentialist ethics. But it seems intuitive to me that a sufficiently complex set rules should be able to match any consequentialism.

ETA2

and that it runs into big problems (and lots of "guesswork") if you try to make it less vague.

So is the problem obligation or supererogation? Is it even desirable to have an ethical system that places fine grained obligations on you in every situation? Don't you need some personal freedom?

People don't even think about what they would want to do in every possible situation because they're more interested in protecting certain status quos rather than figuring out what it is that they actually want to accomplish. Is "protecting certain status quos" their true terminal value?

Maybe. But if popular deontology leverages status seeking to motivate minimal ethical behaviour, why not consider that a feature rather than a bug? You have to motivate ethics somehow.

Or maybe you complaint is that popular deontology is too minimal, and doesn't motivate personal growth. My reaction would then be that, while personal growth is a thing, it isnt a matter of central concern to ethics, and an ethical system isnt required to motivate it, and isnt broken if it doesn't,

Or maybe your objection is that deontology isnt doing enough to encourage societal goals. I do think that sort of thing is a proper goal of ethics, and that is a consideration that went into my hybrid approach: not killing is obligatory; making the world a better place is, nice-to-have, supererogatory. The obligation comes from the deontologcal component, which is minimal, so utilitarian demandingness is avoided.