curfew's in a half, so I'll check those out later, but I'll add my own gripes about the speech: Kaylee had plenty of love for Serenity and everyone around her, she knew she'd fail soon "tells you she's hurting before she keens", and Mal let penny-pinching get in the way of making her well, and Serenity broke and the Home had to be abandoned and the Family broken up in Out of Gas.
The reason I love the speech on a non-literal level is a subject that I've touched on twice before in my vids: most blatantly in "Prep for Flight". The idea that you can do what you need to survive, but you're not really living, because you're not loving. And if you can't love, you're not flying. It's almost counter to the concept of "keep flying". I've actually grown to hate "keep flying" because of it, because it means that one is surviving on the most barest limits, and not actually living.
Not actually doing the things that constitute having a life: love, family, home. That "keep flying" isn't as worthy as actually Flying. And Flying means letting yourself fall, means stop trying to survive, and start living, loving, even if it means you crash, and maybe you burn. And maybe you don't come back from that. You don't survive that, but you lived, you flew, really flew.
I wonder if it was a concept that was deliberately meant to have multiple meanings over the course of the story: the pilot ends with "keep flying/surviving", but the movie ends with "flying/living/loving".
And that's a whole jumbled mess of trying to articulate something that I feel about the show and movie in general, and maybe it doesn't make sense, but I'll say that I agree with you in the sense that I wish the flying speech hadn't gone on as much as it had, in such a specific direction, because, yes, the metaphor doesn't match up quite so nicely.
I mean, I don't think that letting love in and allowing yourself to love will keep you alive, keep you in flight, as the speech implies, but I do think that it could make you more in tune with things that need fixing (relationships, engine parts). Where "Love's Divine" differs from "Prep for Flight" is that the latter embraces the idea that "falling [in love] in order to fly" could mean that you crash and burn, whereas "surviving" means you could live a long, healthy, and empty life. But Mal's willingness to die for his belief counters that to a degree.
/ramble makesnosense ramble makesnosense ramble makesnosense.
Maybe I'd be in bed by now if I'd just read your links!