You know your stuff. I wanted to warn about this, but may have underestimated you. An interesting thing, Ben Hur had like dozens of remakes (not all are even that well known). It was also a theater play and some stagings were "pretentious"
enough to bring sand on stage thus making it actually very, very similar to simulated sea battles in ancient arenas where they pored water in the arenas.
Nevertheless, it is interesting how the remake itself is not an issue, but we mostly simply don't like the way things are being remade today. Although, to the dread of most of us, in 40 years someone might see this one as his "59' remake", the one he saw when he was a kid and that stuck with him.
Remakes are very interesting. I remember discussing this tirelessly back when I was on my PhD (never finished, in case you wonder); unless the director himself (or better yet the holy trinity director/cameraman/screenwriter) don't openly state they remade something, there's no real way of finding out. Perhaps you could argue it is a remake by analyzing style of some scenes, but then perhaps it was just a few scenes and not everything.
Movies based on books are best examples of this. Is every new Frankenstein a remake of the famous universal 'monster-flick' with Boris Karloff making a sort of chain of remakes, or is every new Frankenstein a new adaptation originating from the book itself?
