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I'll take a look at this tonight -- thanks for posting here! We don't get a lot of traffic to this subforum, but I do watch it. Alright, I have one main thought as I'm watching: I think that the frame for your analysis could be more consistently expanded to include not merely historic references, but how other media portrays those cultures/periods. Compare the the Cascade Kingdom's music to the Jurassic Park overture, for instance -- that's much more relevant than ancient bone flutes (which, as you correctly note, we know little about in terms of compositional practice). Similarly, the Lake music has more to do with the topic of "water levels" than it does any one culture. You also get right that the Ruins area reference Morricone as much as it does traditional Latin music. Make sure you apply that type of connection for each area, especially when something clearly doesn't fit your model.

Basically I just use the methodology explained in https://www.puremix.net/video/creating-space-with-reverbs.html (it's a paid thingie): 1 - One reverb with just early reflections. Typically I use this mostly for live recordings (that usually are close mic'ed) to give them a bit of distance from the mic. It can sometimes also be handy to phatten up a tone at times, but it's primarily in use for recordings. 2 - A plate reverb that's typically used to create distance. I use this one on most of the instruments, with varying send levels. 3 - A hall reverb for 'height'. Typically I only use this for lead instruments and sometimes for snares and claps. Not quite the same setup as I use, but more or less based on the same concepts and it's free, so this might be useful: It's a setup I've been working with for close to 2 years now, it works for me and essentially I have 3 preset channel strips for it now where I sometimes just change the reverb to a different preset. Otherwise I just call it a day and move on. As for getting messy with multiple reverbs, not really. If you apply things subtly and smartly (and very important, EQ the reverbs!), it'll sound fine (IMO). Here's just an example of a sparser track I did with this setup:

Hey guys, it's been a long time, but here's an atmospheric Final Fantasy mashup of FF4's Prelude and FF6's Terra with dubstep and light glitch elements! This has been submitted to OCR on March 18, 2018. [EDIT: To show the timeline, this just got approved August 31, 2018 for a direct-post, so about 5 months in this case.] This was inspired by Stephen Anderson (stephen-anderson on soundcloud); it primarily uses bell and pad textures from Spectrasonics' Omnisphere 2; a Chapman Stick from Trilian; 4Front's TruePianos; and various FM sounds from my Zebra2 soundbank "FM Variations". Glitching was via Illformed's Glitch 2, and some of the remaining stuff was from LA Scoring Strings, Rhapsody Orchestral Percussion, and Serum. The solo violin was Embertone's Friedlander, highly recommend it!