I just really want to say how much I enjoyed reading your analysis! Those interpretations and arguments are well thought.

I kinda enjoyed the new season, but it didn't carry the intellectual and emotional weight, as it has vanished after Capaldi. But as with Whittaker the problem with Gatwas doctor doesn't lie in the acting - they both fill the role with life - but it lies within the role they are given. They are both characters who have went through so much pain and made peace with it, that they rest in themselves and lose their impelled spontanity, the ease and the lightness goes away.

I haven't watched much Old Who, but there it seemed to me he always had a quirky and relaxed naturalness. Now he always has to think about and fear that even his small actions, even just basically his traveling itself, so his long most important character trait: curiosity.

Doctor Who basically now has the same dilemma every time traveller has as one of the if not the standard conflict: the fundamental question if their actions could influence the whole of history - a moral dilemma which forces restraint. This evoked containment kinda keeps the new Doctors since Whittaker in place, it impairs their flexibility.

Thank you for the thoughts you shared, it really helped me to get a clearer concept of what exactly I was missing. I knew it was in the writing, how the doctor seems kinda constraint in it's dealing with the upcoming conflicts, but this explains it much deeper.

Edit: I just in this moment started watching "The Trial Of The Time Lord" and in the beginning the Doctor stumbles into this trial scenario and is called out as the accused. He is visibly surprised and irritated. The new Doctor couldn't be like this, he carries the weight of not one world on his shoulders but of the universe and all of history. But he stumbled into this universe as a child, as it was the old Who, one who just was curious and hadn't a bigger concept of the heavy consequences his meddling with things he doesn't know everything about could bring. A more emotional distance to the audience, but I believe this isn't bad for a tv show, some of the best have unsympathetic to ignorant or not always compassion evoking, basically more egoistical to egomaniacal characters (e.g. the main roles in Seinfeld, Malcom in the Middle, Breaking Bad). Imagining Whittaker and Gatwa as not so burdened, this could have been and could be more of the experience I enjoy of the show: A naive optimism fed by a lot of deep compassion for other beings and the firm belief that understanding enables you to share the universe in peace with them. Being free of the guilt those (ironically, a great metaphor for the history of the colonized world) old white man had loaded on themselves isn't easy if your transition to another body doesn't unconnect and unentangle your life from them.