Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It eventually took Newton, few decades later, to basically sort things out by providing a) an actual explanation for why stuff would orbit other stuff I'm not sure how you got here. By the standards you're applying to Galileo, Newton did nothing of the kind. The limit of Newton's explanation for why stuff orbits other stuff is "because it's stuff" (you might say "because the stuff has mass"... but all stuff has mas…
"Because it's stuff" is considerably better than "because it's Quintessence", and "stuff is attracted to other stuff with a force F⃗ = GD̂m₁m₂/D², which accelerates it by a vector m/F⃗, whose integral is its velocity vector, whose integral ∫∫(GD̂(t)m₂/D²(t))dt² is its displacement, and the Sun has a whole hell of a lot of stuff in it, from which we can derive Kepler's Three Laws as follows…" is really a dramatically…
And everything you've said about Newton refers to answering the question of how much stuff is attracted to other stuff, not why it is. He was able to show that the natural motion of everything is circular (unless it's in perfect stasis), and to describe with great precision the form of the circles involved (and how they deform into ellipses), but there's no why anywhere. Newton can't justify the force of gravity varying with the square of distance except by observing that it happens to work in practice. He certainly can't explain why it's not zero -- it could have been zero. (Sure, it's very fair to say he told us why Kepler's laws obtained. But that wasn't the question, the question was "why is stuff attracted to other stuff?")