I grasp #1 just fine despite what your presumptions may lead you to believe. And that did not lead me to choose #2. A hardcore junkie's desire for drugs may override his or her self-preservation, but that doesn't mean I automatically sympathize with the situation and would choose (if I had the capacity to) the same result if I were in that situation.
By the time I wanted to write about it way back when, it had faded from the public consciousness quite a bit. The rerelease brought it back for both myself and the game-playing public.
Also, "objective opinion"? Isn't that an oxymoron?
Article is a scheduled post and will be available to read by midnight tonight. My apologies if you can't access it at the moment.
I think you're going for a strawman here. I'm not saying (or at least I didn't intend to say) that the game needed tons of explanation. I am, however, saying that it opted for the other extreme and had way too little. ICO didn't have much explanation either, but it worked fine since, for instance, there were actually interactions between the main human characters.