I suspect with LMM, that what you see as a careful design is likely the result of a number of different ways of creating, when I meet creative people, people who write music and/or lyrics, people who write books and plays, other kinds of artists, what I often get from them there is no one way, that sometimes it comes by careful plotting, other times it happens by inspiration. Guy I work with has a band and writes songs for it, and it can happen a variety of ways, sometimes he’ll write music and the lyrics flow from that, sometimes he writes lyrics that get to him and the music inspires him, sometimes they come together. Genius is a funny thing, kind of like trying to frame the concept of God, in the end there is no way to really frame it, it just is:).
With the complaints I have heard about Hamilton, I agree with another poster, it is usually people with a very narrow view. Academic historians get their nose bent out of joint that their writings get read by like 100 people, and feel that LMM is somehow ‘stealing their thunder’ and whatnot, because of course they said it better (leaving out the debt that LMM publicly acknowledges to Chernow and other historians as well). Then, too, there are those that are troubled that it showed the founders for what they were, human beings, with all the warts and glory that go with that. To people who try and sell the founders as if they were prophets, who wrote a ‘perfect’ constitution and had the ‘one true image of this country’, what Hamilton shows is that they created something as best they could and hoped, ad Franklin once said, that it survived despite facing odds a kinder provident would not have let them face…and that the battles we face today are not all that much different than they faced there, the whole states rights/central government/farm versus urban were major facets of that period and remained so. There are those from various sides who either want to hagiorize the founders or rip them to shreds, both taking away their fundamental humanity in making them either gods or villains, when they were both and neither.
I haven’t seen Hamilton, I suspect I either will have to wait, or hope someone uses their head and shows the original cast on PBS as a “Great Performances” (not optimistic, all the parties involved in such things generally don’t listen to their higher natures and as a result, many, many great Broadway performances are lost to anyone but theater people and researches). , I have only heard the soundtrack many times, the specials on it, interviews with LMM, and I think one of the reasons it works is that it shows the humanity of the people in the story, and I think it resonates to hear their words done in a modern context, it brings home that despite what some may think, a person who is black or hispanic could very easily have been a hamilton or jefferson or Burr or whatnot, that revolutions and ideas are human, pure and simple. As Clive Barnes wrote about “Hair” back when a lot of critics trashed it, he said it was telling a very old story in modern terms, with 'the voice of today rather than the voice of yesterday", and I think Hamilton is like that (in an interview many years later, Barnes, the NYT theater critic, pointed out that the same critics who trashed “Hair” loved 1776, favoring revolutionaries from the past while trashing those of today…).
As far as what Hamilton would have done, I suspect a friend of mine was right, that Hamilton had he not died likely would not have done that much more, that his critical flaws would have kept him from the presidency or other seats of power (he said basically Burr did the country a favor by shooting Hamilton, that Hamilton was something of a megalomaniac when it came to searching for power and had far too little respect for the republic to not grasp the chance to be a dictator). He had alienated too many people, his power grabs under Washington had alienated the other federalists, and the Jeffersonian types saw him as an aristocratic type trying to seize power. Hamilton from my view of reading about him was kind of a character from a Greek tragedy, the brilliance that let him help establish this country, especially economically, was kind of his fatal flaw because it wasn’t tempered by brilliance emotionally, and that in the end ruined him IMO.
But there were other nuances that I had not noticed – I went back and listened again with yet another layer of appreciation. Hamilton is a work of genius, IMHO.