I know where Brash is coming from. Cutting down the meadow scene dialogue makes the scene too short on its own. What's more is that, because it's so short, it lacks substantial emotional punctuation before cutting back to Kamino. Basically, it gets lost in the mix, and feels like an awkward edit. It becomes forgettable.
While I hate, absolutely HATE the second half of the scene (based simply on the horribly designed animals), you have to split hairs. If you want the love story to progress in even a somewhat believeable fashion, you'll have to retain every possible scene to help move their relationship along (which the original film does horribly), and bite the bullet by keeping the crappy following scene. The other option is cut it all out, and hope the remaining scenes are enough to make it work.
The problem with the Phantom Edit of EPISODE II is that it dumps so much of these scenes. It jumps from a scene where Padmé denies that Anakin is her boyfriend to them kissing, and then, implying they slept together all night. It's too bare minimum. With some ingenuinity, you can make most of the scenes work almost beautifully. Plus, you can shuffle the scenes around to fit whatever progression you choose. Unfortunately, in the meadow scene instance, it is a splitting hairs situation.
As for your Dooku scene? Nicely done. I'm sure in the 100s of films Christopher Lee has done, you can find him saying whatever you need him to. Making it all seamless is the only obstacle.
-NJM