Good analysis, and a snippet of interview with Abrams highly suggests you're on the right track.

He confirmed that Kylo Ren knows about Anakin's last minute return to the light. He sees it as a failure on Vader's part, a betrayal of Darth Vader by his Anakin Skywalker side (Abrams says Kylo tends to see them as separate entities), a weakness that let Vader fall for the enemy's seduction. In this light your hypothesis that Ren seems to deliberately put himself beyond a return to the light is probably dead on the money: it's his goal, and probably his greatest fear is that Kylo Ren might not have fully vanquished the Ben Solo part of himself.

That may be the most interesting (and most original) novelty: Kylo Ren seems to see the temptations of the Light the same way the Jedi see the temptations of the dark side.

In any case, after what happened to Han, it doesn't sound like appealing to who he was will work on this one...

As for how he turned to the dark side, the novelization apparently spells out that Snoke had been influencing Ben Solo since childhood and the reason why Leia sent her son to Luke for training early is that she could sense his darkness.