I agree, we should take people's actions as part of the context they were made in. No need to yell at the past, just learn from it and avoid making the same mistakes again and again.

I'd agree that there are internal structures that allow us to process music better or worse (which could be part of that baseline musical intelligence you talk about).

And funny you mention that about the relationship between language and music since I wrote an article just about that if you're interested:

https://medium.com/p/f919717f5bca

Cheers!