Oh hay, you are awesome. No really, I have no understanding of musical structure at all, but I am a mad soundtrack consumer and fangirl to the nth degree, and seeing someone explain it to me is just something unique that doesn't happen everyday and omg. Srsly. Awesome. You.

I completely agree about the film bypassing the frontier mythos (and all themes associated therewith) which so saturated previous canons. I don't think that's a bad thing - I find Hollywood's vague drift away from Westerns stronger at the moment and an interesting phenomenon, since the relationship between US creators/audiences and the Western mythos is a strong indicator of it's overall dominant paradigms - but I'd also argue that they went way backwards in source material, going straight from the age-old three-arc hero destiny story, which Giacchino's pretty good at composing for (the Incredibles, Speed Racer, etc).