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Right, I don't think we have any disagreements. Speaking of dry essays on the subject, I have a $120 book by George Perle which deals entirely with his use of set theory in his own music, presented in the most needlessly difficult language possible. Unsurprisingly, I put up with about half of it and it has been sitting on my shelf ever since (the only music text I've ever given up reading). Anyways, to be fair to those that are interested, I'll leave this thread to the discussion presented in the OP.

Oh, by 'set theory' I was assuming that we were talking about dodecaphony (as indicated by my first post). My mistake. Also, I couldn't help but notice that your example on the other page looks a lot like how many people have approached analysis of Bartok's 4th String Quartet (though I am aware of the disparity that often exists between composition and analysis). Now after being better familiarized with what exactly is being discussed, I still don't think that anything composed using 'set theory' is fundamentally devoid of musicality. As you successfully demonstrated earlier, the same conclusions can be drawn by simply putting two-and-two together so I agree with you (and others that have posted) in that set theory isn't exactly practical. All the same, I can understand why it is appealing to some composers because of the ability to precisely control elements of their compositions from a very basic level. I was actually doing similar things for a little bit and I liked the ability I had over interval content and having total chromaticism with certain consistencies between constituent groups of pitches. I only wrote one piece in this manner (it was a flute duo I had on this site for a little bit). It didn't lack musicality, but from writing it I learned that I needed more freedom...

I know how to do long division, does that count?