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Notes -
Ideology has little to do with it I think. He doesn't give a shit about accuracy in general if it contradicts what he wants to do - one of the major complaints about Napoleon afaict. Gladiator certainly wasn't historically accurate and yet was very good.
Scott imo has always been a high variance director. The problem with Gladiator 2 and some of his other stuff -compared to The Last Duel for example - is that the script is awful.
The new problem he has though is that he's old and seems to want to bang out movies while he can and so just takes the path of least resistance. A cinematographer of his was complaining about it recently iirc.
Gladiator also had a messy script but he and Crowe pulled something amazing from it. He may simply not have the stamina to do that any more.
I read that recently Scott prefers to put a ton of cameras at lots of different angles around a scene, which ostensibly lets the actors have more freedom to move around and not worry about blocking, but also gets so much coverage that he can do far fewer takes and then edit everything together in post. This makes his filmmaking super fast for the scale, but also renders a lot of his shots and scenes less interesting and well-crafted.
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Might be a combination of the factors brought up by you and @Loquat
Over confident director with little time left, no one vetoing him, decaying fluid intelligence due to age, lacking in stamina as well and thus taking the path of least resistance instead of taking the time for a complicated decision making process on each point of difficulty...
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