This is where you're wrong, and where our disagreement lies.
You treat functional harmony as a static, universal doctrine that dictates how and why certain chord structures sound appealing. This is incorrect.
Functional harmony, and music theory in general, are post-incidental studies and ways of describing discussing or analyzing music that has been written.
Theory is the study of music, and particularly its tendencies and progressions it has gone through, throughout history and in various cultures.
A chord is not primitive or civilized. You suggested a way to make it more obviously lead to from its penultimate chord to its final chord. Whether a smoother transition is better than a more contrasted transition is not a matter of objective universal fact. It's up to the composer, and to think in every musical situation, there is only one correct compositional choice, would lead to the kind of musical blandness and sameness that we had in the Classical era. >.>
For the record, the specific example in Flying Battery Zone (I can't believe you people, have you never played Sonic?) does in fact use your version. It is in A minor and the chords from the section in question are: FMaj7, GMaj, E7, Amin (GMaj)
And that's very nice that you've done musical things. All that assuming you're the only credible person here though.. talk about pompous. I myself have written a CD of piano compositions, and in fact have sold several copies (I haven't gotten around to making another batch though, life's been hectic). Many of the tracks are on my Soundclick of ye old.
I'll just try to leave it at that and not go into the detailed story of my musical upbringing and at what age I did what things etc., because if I were to turn this into a who's-the-bigger-musical-prodigy epeen contest, I'd have my head just as far up my ass as you.
Music theory doesn't tell you what sounds good. This is a disturbingly common misconception, made by people to whom it would be in their best interest if true, due to lack of a good ear. It (music theory) tries (keyword: tries, often succeeds, but is in fact not a proper science) to explain, after the fact, why things that got used and reused in a certain era of music, sounded good.
Your ability to tell if something sounds good should not come from your musical training. It should come from your ear.
Most of the people I've ever come across who were particularly rigid and verbose with their music theory, happened to have a terrible ear.
I haven't been studying music theory in quite some time now, but I assure you I went through all the theory training you did. 50% of it was crap then, it's crap now. If there's something that doesn't make sense in music theory, I will shove it down and rise above it. It started when I taught myself 3 against 4 using a simple math problem, after my piano teacher of the time taught it to me incorrectly. Now it's laughing at people who've never touched +III chords because they think it's not allowed to go anywhere. Speaking of which, if that chord is so horrible, why force yourself into it by only allowing harmonic minor?
To be honest, I'm still not clear on what the deal is with your whole "chord progressions are in harmonic minor" thing. Why? You said something about always having a V-i cadence. That's retarded. v-i is a cadence as well, and anyone who blocks out their ability to hear that because Bach didn't use it, is retarded.
If you have the time to listen, tell me how primitive my chords in Reminiscence are. (Just don't be unfair and judge it by the first minute and 20 seconds when it's just switching between the two chords for the intro =p).