Lovely, lovely thoughts. Your interpretation of the treatment of the female characters seems very plausible to me. I think it's important to remember that Angel is a male oriented show, plus has its basis in film noir, so it's hard to get away from the "damsel in distress" motif, but the female characters are there largely for the men to interact with and it's the opposite on Buffy, so killing off Fred still bothers me, but not excessively.