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I've done my fair share of revisiting / finishing old works. Of course I understand how valuable the old versions can be as a testimonial about my growth (?) and development (?) as a composer - but on the other hand I'd be ashamed if anyone would ever listen my totally embarrasing early pieces without they being at least somehow upgraded to a listenable standard. Just a thought...

Brahms' music doesn't need to be justified, he simply composed incredible music. If he had pandered to those who wanted something revolutionary his artistic voice would have been compromised. That alone is something I consider revolutionary. Yes you could make a case for his harmony, rhythm and developing variations, but Saint-Saen's, for example, also did crazy stuff with harmony and rhythm but most of his music is forgettable. We need to realize that every composer has a voice unique to them. The simple choices and idiosyncrasies a composer makes with every note of every bar on the micro level is what creates the sum total on the macro level. We look at the basics: harmony, rhythm, orchestration, etc.... but it's those micro-idiosyncrasies, those incalculably minute choices a composers makes that actually ends up making a composers musical fingerprint. I don't love the music of Brahms for anything he did "revolutionary", I simply love the guy's compositional voice that was unique to him.

Any work you create is a document of a certain period. And always there are good compositions and bad compositions in your opus. For example: I know I could have reworked my Divertimento grazioso from 1998 and improve it but why? I think it's the best I have managed to do then. It would lose all charm of that period. So no turning back. All the flaws you encounter and understand shall be fixed in future compositions.

I usually finish a piece and can't stand to listen to it anymore. Imagine the pleasure I get with the thought of the ideas I didn't finish. I am for reworking themes though. I've resurrected themes from string and piano pieces to make weird electronic music. Kinda cool I guess.

Sometimes I like leaving old pieces as they are so I can track my progress. If I went back and redid everything, that would be lost.

I'm typically against revisiting old works. As young composer we are still finding our compositional voice and revisiting old works isn't really progressing forward. Unless the work was unfinished because of time or commitment constraints and still fits in your current style. Besides that trying to finish or rework old pieces just seems like a step back in our development of our music creating skills.

Not really, you'll get at least as many great composers in any other given century of music. Like, look at 1850-1950. A century of music and you have Brahms, Wagner, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Mahler, Puccini, Strauss, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky & Prokofiev, along with early Shostakovich, and that's just classical music. Could just as easily say all earlier composers spent their lives preparing the way for them. For the ~1715-1830 group if you're including Bach and Handel you also need to include Rameau, Couperin le Grand, Scarlatti and Vivaldi. Hell, in the interregnum (1830-1850) alone you have Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Schumann, Berlioz and Bellini, all of whom are standard repertoire figures beloved of listeners. I think that brings us to the main problem really which is that there is too much music. We have to thin it out some so it's not just Bach and Haydn and Beethoven getting all the attention. To start with, Beethoven is far too overplayed, causing his music to lose its value and uniqueness due to its omnipresence. To preserve what's left of its value we need to destroy the music, in order to preserve it in collective memory—the "Age of Beethoven", 1770-2014. Beethoven's achievement would then become far more valuable to future generations if all that was left of it was the documentation in text of its effects on people—we have already forgotten how to listen to it. The Ninth Symphony no longer inspires terror and awe, the Fourteenth Quartet has lost its nature of intense inwardness and become simply comfortable background music. Send them to the bonfire so that the memory of them will inspire us further. The same could profitably be done with Bach and Mozart, and the works of Haydn, Handel and Schubert are far too numerous in number and could easily be reduced by one-half or more without much loss.

Just because its not functional in the traditional sense doesnt mean the relationship it has with other chords is unimportant. In some cases, knowing the roots of an ambiguous chords allows us to figure out the larger progressions at hand. Be it chromatic mediants, a chord progression that follows a very particular pattern, figuring out if the roots are moving in half steps or whole steps, or if the roots are mimicking traditional functions while the quality of the chords are not... and so on and so forth. Remember, when analyzing post-tonal music (contemporary music that breaks from traditions) you must use a variety of tools to analyze. G quartal chord going to a Cdim or something like that may not be functional in the traditional sense, but the fact that the roots still move in fifths may be a piece to a bigger puzzle.