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And not just know them better, but fill out their background in a more personal and memorable way than simple notes and questionnaire responses. These stick with me as I get back to writing actual story scenes. For Dryad I wrote some scenes about my main character growing up, and the relationship with his parents. I still remember the scene I wrote for when his father died. Almost none of this information made it into the novel, beyond the fact that the character had no other family, but it all fed into how I felt about the character and how he responded in some situations and conversations. I also wrote about how he met his wife and how they lived back then. This fed the story more directly, not in the story events but in the background detail - for example how the house was set up when we meet the main character in the story. It gave him a life, a reality to draw on that helped to stop him just reciting his lines.
I don't think main characters have to be simple, they probably shouldn't, but they don't have to be dazzling either. They have to be real enough to interest you, the writer, and when that happens you trust that it will show in how you write them. It is common for main protagonists to be less flamboyant than some other characters. For a start, being too colourful is hard to maintain in a way that doesn't irritate the reader, and perhaps more importantly, giving your main character too much colour can get in the way of revealing the story.
Of course, it varies from story to story. Sometimes the main character's character is the story to a significant extent (eg: Stephen Donaldson's Thomas Covenant). But in many cases the story is what happens to someone relatively ordinary (which isn't necessarily the same as simple), and too much colour would take away the reader's involvement in this process.
I'd also add: don't knock stereotypes. Just as so many stories can be interpreted as just another "Hero's Journey", so many characters can be boiled down to a set of typical human traits. Part of the writer's job is to hide this from the reader. It forms part of what Stephen King calls a writer's ESP: the ability to write a phrase that will trigger a reaction in the reader, without being obvious about it, and one of those reactions is the all-to-human trait of categorising people. We can't afford to describe how wonderfully unique and individual every character is book really is, so we tickle the reader into generalising: bossy old woman, ugly bully, soppy love struck teenager, whatever. Do it well enough and you have a town full of people that the reader has mostly constructed for you, and do it right and each reader's town will look quite a lot like most other reader's towns. King, in his early years in particular, was a master at this.
I completely relate to the "this is rubbish" feeling. I keep a journal, and reading over it can give the impression of some sort of bipolar disorder. It seems that, for me, when the writing is going well I am upbeat and feel good about everything, but when I hit one of many dry spells I get depressed and everything looks like a waste of effort. Generally I try to ignore the periods of depression (I'm not saying it's easy), and hope they'll go away if I keep pushing.
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