Interesting point. Yes people do pretend to be happy to fulfill the status quo. But the biggest problem to me isn't between pretending and being but rather the authenticity of the being. In a "Brave New World", in order to avoid uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, loneliness anger etc, people ingested a drug known as "soma".
This is important because today we have a lot of soma type drugs and liquids freely consumed by the public; alcohol, xanax, cocaine, CBD oil etc.
These drugs make people believe that they are happy. Almost like a psychological trick. These drugs bypass the natural power process of human growth and development to create artificial happiness.
Let's suppose that there is a real life soma available and no one has to feel unhappy again. A solution that will "cure" the pretenders when the aforementioned drugs do not. A perfect dystopia. One would then have to consider the first point of your post.
Is the perfect society one where everyone is eternally happy or one where everyone is human, exercising the full range of their emotions?
Perhaps the perfect society is this, and the past, and the next. All perfect for different times and circumstances. Eternal happiness is unattainable for the human, at least it seems to me, but the goal is always to have the greatest degree of it.
But I agree with what you say, and I cannot help but see the error of my first comment, and is that society can't seek the highest degree of happiness, because the nature of happiness implores not to be sought. If you are looking for something, it is precisely because you don't have it, and therefore a society that "seeks happiness" is unhappy. In the same way, I would not consider someone who takes drugs to be happy a truly happy person.
The drugs that seek to deceive the senses of man to make him feel certain emotions try to deny reality and build a fictional world so that the human feels more comfortable. This is the biggest externalization; try to make reality adapt to you so that you are happy, instead of adapting yourself to reality to be happy. Big problem.
It seems that happiness itself can be an evil if it is not given in the right conditions.