>Avoid the onset of undesirable personality traits
Aka, avoid deterioration of my personality over time.
I hadn't noticed this before, but Helena seems to not know everything about HLN-A. "All things considered I'll take that at face value" implies that she didn't know the reasoning behind it, despite being the person who created HLN-A.
I'd wager that this is a testament to how far gone Helena currently is.
I agree with your assessment too. HLN-A is most likely a copy of Helena without any memories. However, since Helena created HLN-A, Helena definitely wasn't stumped by HLN-A's firmware limitations, since Helena is the one who put the limitations in place.