Instead, he wants to take revenge on criminals, like the criminals who killed his parents. 'reduce crime' isn't the same as 'fight crime', he requires the FIGHT part, and the revenge part.

Yeah, that makes him somewhat less sympathetic, but isn't that what everyone likes about batman these days, the darkness?

To be fair, Bruce Wayne does, in most versions of the Batman stories, incredibly vast amounts of local charity of that type (and others), as well as personally going after criminals one by one, and there's probably limited capacity to productively absorb those funds (Wayne's pump-priming charity would probably also be increasing that capacity and enabling Wayne to shift more money into those approaches productively, were it not for the fact that it is somewhat counteracted by the rather extraordinary frequency of supervillian-initiated civic destruction in Gotham, which probably has a negative impact on capacity-development efforts.)