I don't believe God's commandments are barriers, limiting "breathing room", or any of God's commandments for that matter. They free us nicely.
His commandments help us to grow in holiness toward Him faster with less injury to ourselves and more importantly less injury to others.
God is loving and forgiving, but He knows how we operate..how our appetites and passions can attain dominion, how our intellect can get co-opted by our emotions, making it harder to see the truth. Failing to accept that there is a truth that we must use our whole life to strive toward leads us down false paths of happiness: abortion, divorce, drugs, bad use of our sexual gifts, prideful pursuit of professional career, crime, selfishness. These are lies that we fall into because we've not accepted His truth, fully & with abandonment.
Even how God wants us to take care of the poor has to be done in the right way, for the right reason; otherwise it too can become corrupted. It too can turn into a prideful pursuit.