Is it more a lack of understanding rather than empathy?

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Are caring and compasion emotional responses.

For me they are not. Compassion is more of an attitude than a feeling. Caring is more about having an interest in the outcome and doing something to help. I don't need to feel any emotional response to care about someone. Actually I'd say emotions tend to get in the way of caring. People who have emotional responses to another person's distress are more caught up in making themselves feel better, than they are in helping the other person.

Exactly. This is why I have long thought that AS/HFA are in many ways the polar opposite of psychopathy. The irony is that most people tend to think a psychopath would have a blank expression, and they also tend to find people like us "creepy" and unemotional. I think the people they really need to be wary of are those psychopaths who can perfectly mimic NT expressions and empathy yet feel no actual emotions internally.

This is also largely why I find the Intense World Theory so compelling - because it describes exactly what I have always felt, namely that while I have a have time reading other people's emotions or expressing my emotions to them, that once I do manage to connect and comprehend the emotions of others, I feel them with incredible, almost painful intensity.