I don't see it as ambiguity at it, it's irrelevancy. It's you that are putting him at the center, as if somehow knowing your effect on him will somehow make it better for you. It's a variation of the classic client desire to know how they affect the therapist. If something in your therapy isn't working (like what you call pacing and what I would call a need to stop earlier and specifically put things away before the end of session), it's about how you feel about it, not him. He might be losing his ***** in his office after your sessions or calling someone for supervision, you don't know and I think you shouldn't care. The story you tell about his consistency and how he explains it is not ambiguous at all from my reading of it.

An earlier poster hypothesized that you may make therapy about your T as a way of distracting yourself from the real issues for you. I don't give a red rat's booty if you leave this T or therapy altogether but it sounds like it's been working for you because you have come to the point where it is hard and progress has been made. And it sounds like he was recently willing to try to change what happens in session to improve that for you. So what difference does his lofty speeches about therapy or his kind of snobby description of the work of therapy make? It's easy to get lost in the intellectualization of the process and criticize the hell out of the T and the process and even the institution. But none of this helps you deal with what's up with you, although I do think that quitting therapy or changing T's can be right for people.

For me I am a master avoider at dealing with the hard stuff and my T is pretty much the opposite of yours in the sense that he would let me forever linger and avoid and I had to tell him that he had to push me more. For me therapy worked better and better when I grabbed onto my own agency in therapy rather than waiting for him to figure it out. There definitely was a good landing after the hardest stuff, but it required me to step up in communication with him in ways that I hadn't before, to shoulder more responsibility for what happened in session and understanding how it affected me.