Trying to keep clear patterning

It's easier to follow than your 'unleashed' piece.

3 things I noticed :

• The first melody is heard 4 times, 3 are identical and the fourth has a varation but the same conclusion. I would have start to do variations on the third pass and add a different conclusion somewhere.
• I've never heard again this melody in your piece which would have given it more cohesion.
• I've had the feeling of listening 2 pieces in one. Why don't you try to write a ABA structured piece ? (related to point 2)

 

First of all, good on you for taking Mike's feedback on the chin, so to speak. You got some harsh, but honest feedback there and the fact you're here looking to improve yourself speaks to your commitment. Bravo for that! I think I was the one in chat at that time who made the comment it sounded, at certain parts, like "God rest ye merry gentlemen".

At any rate, let's take a look at your new work!

1. Structurally it's better than your unleashed piece. Certainly easier to follow. That said, I still find parts of it teetering close to randomness. There's a lot of stuff going on orchestrationally that is distracting from your main idea. The first 50 seconds I can follow easily. After that it gets increasingly harder and toward the end, I'm really not sure anymore where we came from. Where we end doesn't feel very connected to where we started.
2. Bridging, as you identified, is a bit of an issue. Now this isn't easy, I too struggle with cohesively moving from one idea to the next.
   1. The transition from 0:50 to 0:52 is a bit jarring to my ears. I gave it a couple of listens to try to identify why this was the case, and it sounds to me that up until 0:50 you were building toward a louder dynamic, not a softer one. If I listen from 0:00 to 0:50, the whole thing seems to build, yet at 0:52 this cuts off and suddenly becomes quieter. It's not just the dynamics of course, but on an abstract level, I feel that that is the biggest issue there. It kind of feels like you're stopping in the middle of a phrase and suddenly start to almost whisper.
   2. The aforementioned bridge is also one of the most confusing parts to me because, as far as I can tell, you've got three, sometimes four things going on at once. I can hear celli, flutes (I am guessing it's flutes, they sound a bit strange and organ-like), harp, and either a cor anglais or an oboe. From what I can tell you want my ear to go toward the flutes and what they're doing. If that's the case then I'd suggest you take a hard look at all the other instruments, see if what they're doing is supporting the flutes or distracting from them.
3. Out of all parts, I think your orchestration is where the piece suffers the most... but there is a strange contradiction there too. There some parts of orchestration that are really fun and quirky such as 2:56. You seem wholly untethered by any conventional ideas of which instruments go together well. This leads to some inventive doublings some of the time, but most of the orchestration choices however end up feeling confused. A lot of instruments are doing all kinds of crazy stuff that's not supporting the main idea and while they sometimes work as little counter melodies, too often they're just waltzing through everything else. It's almost like we're hearing two pieces at once! (3:40 is a particularly good example of this).
4. Don't be afraid of rests. It's not a huge problem, but this piece doesn't really pause anywhere to take a breath.

In conclusion:

I don't think you should focus your attention on adding more melodies. If anything, I'd urge you to dial the sophistication knob way down. You're already 50% down from your unleashed piece, but you need to dial it down another 50% at least.

Your idea from 0:00 to 0:50 is perfectly simple, but even that small section I feel you're already overcomplicating it with other rhythms. Simplify is the name of the game. I'd challenge you to present your very first idea (the one startin at 0:00) as a piano sketch, focusing on just these three things: melody, chords, bass and leave all the funky rhythms and counter movements out for now.

I feel Mike's comment about having no shortage of ideas but needing to come down to earth are still applicable to this new composition. You're closer to earth, certainly, but we're still in orbit

I can absolutely see there's more structure. That's not the biggest issue right now. To me, the biggest issue is that you have too many ideas, and you're presenting too many ideas at once and it becomes unfocused as a result. This is why I think you should try to really get down to the the most barebone basics. Play this tune on the piano with just chords underneath and put that up, that's what I'd recommend to you at this stage.

Hope this was helpful. You've already shown being able to take harsh criticism which is why I'm being so blunt. That said, I don't claim to be any better. At the end of the day I am jsut another guy with an opinion and you can do with my opnion as you see fit.

EDIT:

in the unleashed video, the part at 7:25:20 is really quite cool. I really liked that.

 

Music/listening fatigue is definitely a very real problem, I've found. Makes you believe you have to change up things far sooner than you actually have to because you have already heard it a million times. Simplifying will help you in two ways: it'll make the core idea clearer and it will allow you to write faster. Writing faster, I've found, leads me to have less of a listening fatigue problem.

I think Mike mentioned this too in his Unleashed video where he wonders if your composition there was the result of writing slowly. Was this piece written slowly? If I had to guess, it does seem like it (because you mentioned it taking 16 hours spread over a month, right?). If that's what happened, then a piece of immediately applicable advice would be to force yourself to complete a little piece (even if it's just 30 seconds) in the shortest amount of time possible. Just a piano sketch. Really shouldn't take more than a day. This too will force you to write more simply.