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Fascinating. I wish I had more time to study this kind of thing.
You mention the 'thinness on the ground' of material on our own galaxy. I have always found it an amusing paradox that, in a sense, our galaxy (as opposed to the individual stars in it) is the hardest to observe, simply because we are in the middle of it. I remember from undergraduate days in astrophysics that there was a lot of time and effort being expended trying to observe the large sections of the Milky Way generally obscured by the galactic centre.
It's my understanding (correct me if I'm wrong, O knowledgeable ones) that much work is still underway trying to confirm even fairly high-level structure of the Milky Way, such as the shapes of the arms.
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