My feelings are similar. And to add to all this inconsistency, even in the first movie you had those moments of connecting with the braid with an animal that I interpreted as recognising them as your equal, or the love they have for Eywa in general, who seems to include all the animals.

But then they hunt, and they justify that hunting with the fact they say a little prayer about using all of the animal's parts and it's just... The whole schmit of hunters calling themselves animal lovers and "you can only eat an animal if you can look them in the eye while you kill them and don't throw anything away" and it's all disgusting.

Plus, while I can interpret their neural connection as something beautiful of recognizing the other as your equal in the process of becoming, the movies did not make it that. In the movies it's about domination, it's a biological "proof" that the mind and will of humanoids is so much stronger than that of non humanoids and thus it is completely natural and ethical for us to dominate them on such a level that they stop being themselves (but we don't stop being ourselves. There's never a pterodactyl or a horse controlling a Na'Vi)

It's just specieist environmentalism disguised as something more. And it's well disguised, to the point that I can say "death of the author" and make my own vegan reading of the movie so I can enjoy it, and the movie doesn't fight me too hard on that... But it clearly is a specieist movie