Before we talk about the particular issues that you focused on as your thinking changed about the great issues, I want to focus on the fact that you weren't just making this transition as a writer but also as an editor. In Making It. Again, I didn't remember it. Well, I agree with it.
Editorial talent is one of the rarest of all talents.
Much rarer than literary talent, for example. Because it requires two qualities that rarely go together in the same person. On the one hand, it requires great arrogance, because the editor has to assume he knows better than the author about things that the author knows more about, usually. At the same time, it requires great humility, because it means subjecting your own skills to the ideas of someone else. If you are the kind of editor I tried to be for nearly forty years, what you are trying to do is to make this manuscript as good as it possibly can be in its own terms.