Surface Pressure is a great song! I hadn't quite thought about the Bruno thing to quite that depth, but uh, yeah. Those are some very good points.

About Witch King: the reveal of the mutual betrayal didn't have nearly the impact it could have

Myeah. If it had been Bashasa instead of Bashat, I think the betrayals would have had a lot more impact - although that would have made for a very tricky time line. (And also drastically changed Bashasa's character, I guess.) But never meeting Bashat in either timeline kind of left him as a big blank.