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Such devastation as Tolkien posits could have been avoided by striking while the fleet was at sea, & I'm sure Ulmo could have done serious damage.
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But why do this?
At the heart of the tale of Numenor lies a myth and a dream....Tolkien's dream of the great wave and the myth of Atlantis and the subsequent breaking of the world. If that dream element is removed and it becomes merely a tale of the sinking of the fleet by Ulmo, the whole point and reason for the story would, in my opinion, be diminished. In the Letters, Tolkien is clear that this dream and myth is what impelled him to spell out the sinking of Numenor on paper. In our desire to substitute a "just" ending to tidy up Eru's character, we would be guilty of removing the core element of faerie.
As far as I am concerned Eru is Eru and can not be critiqued (or defended) on the basis of whether or not he lives up to our modern expectations of justice or the nature of a just deity. Eru is not identical with God in our "real" world, especially not in terms of his relations with humans. This is true whether we consider the definition of God that is proposed by "religious" groups or those who question the "value" of religion. I think Tolkien would have agreed with this distinction. He repeatedly stated that he was investigating a world where the deity was distant and hidden from view. As Shippey notes, Tolkien wanted to see how men would react when faced with such a stark canvas: what impetus to do good remained to them. This is a pre-revelation world. There may have been a plan hidden in the music that included the element of revelation. Finrod and Andreth's conversation does imply this, and I can not dismiss it lightly. Still, at this point in time--in the first through the fourth age--that plan of revelation, even if it existed, was not known to Men or, by implication, to the readers of the story.
Since the Creator of Arda is so unknown and distant to men, yet also so powerful and all-knowing in the grander scheme of things, how could any man "justly" judge their god in terms of his actions? One thing is clear in Middle-earth: Eru is greater than any other being in or outside Arda and knows things no one else does. Essentially, he has no peers: men lack the wider understanding of the purpose of creation that would allow them to make a reasonable and just verdict on something as cosmic as the breaking of the earth. Yet, without peers, there can be no "just" judgment of Eru, whether we are talking about characters in the story or our own assessment. We may not like the playing field that Tolkien set up. But I see no indication that Tolkien had any doubts that Eru was the chief "good guy", despite the fact that he was so distant.
On a personal level, we are obviously free to question anything in the story. In our own minds, we can do a Milton and create a very attractive, beguiling, creative force of evil. We can turn Morgoth into the good guy or Eru into a destructive, evil force. But I don't see that as compatible with the mindset of Tolkien. If the author's intentions matter, then we have to accept his basic terms. If not....if the reader has complete freedom--, then we can dismiss the basic assumptions Tolkien has woven into the tale. So I guess we get back to canon again....just how much freedom the reader has versus the author. I'm uncomfortable with judging or defending Eru in human terms because he is not human. I also feel uncomfortable interjecting such a "judgment" into the heart of a myth. At the heart of myth or faerie always lies a mystery, something that goes beyond mankind's ability to comprehend. Human judgments destroy part of that mystery. If Tolkien's tales are strictly history, then we can judge but if part of the tale is actual myth, then we are in a different league. For all these reasons, I don't see Eru as a minor, irritable character but rather the core mystery at the heart of Tolkien's legendarium, essentially distant and unable to be comprehended in strictly human terms.