There are multiple ways to approach this question:
Response 1: Critique Rachels' argument. Neither premise 1 nor 2 of Rachels' argument is obviously true. Nor can premise 3 be derived from the prior ones, unless one assumes moral necessitarianism, which is also problematic.
For premise 1, why would God be more important than us? Both rights ethics, and utilitarian ethics tend to weight all moral agents and patients at equal weighting. I personally think that some sort of scaled moral weighting is necessary for any moral system to be useful, but even with that, moral weighting need not have an infinity in it for God.
For premise 2, it is implausible that freedom of action is the absolute of moral values. Freedom is certainly valuable, but how could it be more valuable than, say, existence, or say the discernment of the love/hatred dichotomy, or say the experience of irredeemable despair? That all the others either do or do not occasion are pre-requisites for useful freedom.
For 3, the instated premise of moral necessitarianism is unsupported. Necessity is EXCEEDINGLY difficult to demonstrate even based on abstracts such as logic, the extension of it to moral arguments, which are difficult to justify even objectively exist, appears to be an exceedingly over-optimistic inference.
Response 2: I am aware of a current theologian who accepts premise 2, and uses it to characterize what kind of God could exist. This is Thomas J Oord, and the work of his that I think most directly addresses this issue is "God Can't". Oord does not agree with Rachels conclusion, however.
Oord's version of God is capable of omnipotence (and presumably omniscience), but because Oord and his God accept premise 2, he argues that God self-limits because of Its moral nature, and therefore does not act in this world as that would take away freedom from us, and the other agents within it. Oord's conception of God does not allow God to be a creator of the universe, as an act of creation would constrain the freedom the particles of such a universe. Oord's God is therefore not a creator God.
Oord focuses on omnipotence, and I fear does not think thru the power of Omniscience, as an omniscient deity could convince any of us to do whatever we ought to, as omniscience gifts the knowledge and wisdom to provide absolutely convincing arguments. If one is informed of the good, and chooses to do good, this is complete freedom per his formula, and given the agency he extends to all of the pieces of the universe, all a deity would need is omniscience rather than omnipotence to lead to the universe's moral maximization thru the power of God's persuasion.
Oord's God would therefore have to be also self-muted, not just self-crippled, for our morally flawed universe to be explained by it. As he is a Christian, who thinks God walked the earth and communicated Christianity, his God is at best only partially self-muted, as well as only partially self-crippled. I don't think this theology works, but Oord provides an interesting example of how one can run with premise 2, and arrive at a different place than Rachels.
Response 3: the scholastic approach to the Problem of Evil, which is to try to work thru the concepts of absolutes and necessity, is not how the problem was originally formulated. Epicurus's statement of the POE is an empirical test case. This is consistent with Kant's, and post-Kantian focus in philosophy, on the limits of rationalism.
What one can do empirically with God hypotheses, is derive predicted consequences from them, then examine our world to see if it is consistent with that hypothesis or not. One can postulate an Omni-God, and the consequence of that postulate is that our universe would be the best of all possible worlds. The moral failings of our world are the POE test case for this, and one of many failed test cases. Our universe is also not optimally beautiful, optimally variable, optimally law-like, optimally well communicated, optimally configured for life, optimally understandable, optimally mysterious, or any other possible predicted optima based on inferred Divine objectives.
Note that for each of the above, one need not even have omnipotence nor omniscience for the failed test cases to be problematic. IF there is a single dominant entity working in our universe, even if that entity is not the universe's designer, then that entity would be able to apply willing to the structure of the universe, and cause it to progressively approach a desired optimal state. Even a God of limited power or knowledge should have caused our universe to approach any desired optima. It is only thru absolute self-restraint of some kind such as Oord proposes, or alternatively due to a form of insanity (an inability to maintain thoughts over time on the part of a damaged God would also lead to ineffectiveness) that even a limited God would also not lead to a universe closely approaching optimum.
Response 4: Yes, contra to the scholastics, and instead consistent with treating all God hypotheses as on the table, a God could be a Dystheist God. However, our universe is also not maximally evil, so the same empirical test cases that Omni-Gods fail for omnibenevolence, other God hypotheses fail for omni-malevolence. This is also true for any mixed moral character as our universe is not just not optimized morally, it also is not optimized in any other way. Whatever character a monotheist God has, it would still optimize, or near optimize, based on the objectives its character calls for.
Response 5: The only God hypotheses that pass these empirical optimization tests are Deist Gods who have no objectives, insane Gods who cannot maintain a coherent thought direction, an extremely multitudinous polytheism with weak Gods such that our universe has too many competing small actions on it that it cannot develop a character, or di-theism with two almost identically powerful and hostilely competing agents in it.
