While I respect your preference in music, I do feel it fits. In fact I was inspired by certain sections and designed the shots around the music.
Your criticism does apply to a some shots, but not all. Let me explain how I laid it out for myself.
0:00-0:28 Violin section, tragic; outpost massacre; 2 key beats aligned with explosions
0:29-0:43 Tonal shift to uptempo, brewing anticipation; allied forces jump in, initial orders; in on first heavy beat, out on drumroll
0:44-1:11 Vocals appear, establishing main theme--> increased excitement (but not heroic, there is a rise and fall that forbodes the coming losses); fighters begin engagement (topdown of wings closing) acts as a visual trasition from brewing to frantic dogfighting--for the most part, the connotation is negative, allied fighters are outmatched, and the measured music (budam chi) fits it.
There were a number of heavy beats that I tried to key the shots to in this section to varying degrees of success, I'll address this later. The bomber shot transitions from dogfighting to capship engagements. The rakshasa blowing is keyed to the crescendo.
1:12-1:40 Full on, dialed-to-eleven epicness; visually we transition to the full scale of the battle with a bang (on the bang). In the first shot we see most of the ships, beams and flak flying everywhere, ****'s blowing up, etc. 1:12 is therefore both the aural and visual climax. The loss of the phoenicia, i don't think is any more or any less significant than the first shot. I think the first shot actually is more dramatic. In any case, the fall of the Phoenicia is keyed(approximately) to a mournful fall in the melody at 1:22 and the following perseus chase at around the rise... okay I just checked the video and I mis-edited that when I was resyncing the audio, it's closer in the actual mission. And as you mentioned, the last three shots lead to the final crescendo. The music is dramatic, but a bit slower. Accordingly the camera moves are smooth and long (actually, i chose this music partly because such cameras and cuts are simpler). The penultimate shot on the cymbals I particularly enjoyed because I didn't expect it to look so good after just placing the ships, usually I'd have to script some behaviour. Anyways, that's that.
So, there are some limitations to FRED. I timed the shots using a modified time-elapsed sequencing (just a time variable that I added the length of each shot to). As such I could only make cuts in full second intervals, unless I fiddled with time compression (too much work for too little gain). Also, the shots ended up needing a minimum of 4 seconds: FSO doesn't look very good with super fast camera moves, that was the amount of time I needed to tell the story in a shot, and I didn't want to do so many shots. These two together make timing a little more difficult.
Subjectively, I do see space battles when I hear pounding orchestral nuggets of music.
While I do understand people's concerns about overuse, I do believe that the music was used appropriately in this case.
Of course, I'm open to suggestions. I don't think anyone has offered any yet for music.