it really 'grates my cheese' If you were a cheese, what kind of cheese would you be? 
...running out of fresh ideas he takes an original work, makes a variation on it, adds a soprano and labels it a new piece.
You don't know this to be the case. Perhaps he's written so much music, has so much collected stuff in his pantheon, that sometimes he feels he has already written the perfect piece for a given scene.
Further it really 'grates my cheese' to hear a nomination for most/best original score - for something highly unoriginal!!
Unoriginal? How so? Because he sounds like himself? Example: I don't know how many Bach organworks sound ...EXACTLY... alike. I wouldn't call Bach 'unoriginal' though.
why now must he go and stuff it all up by giving us cheap, recycled music.
Well, not having listened to Bicentennial Man, I do not feel this soundtrack is cheap or recycled. Even if it were recycled, how is it cheap? Perhaps he is improving upon his genius? Perhaps he thought he could do better than the last album? Wanted to give it another go?
Listen carefully next time. You'll hear what I am talking about.
I once recognized a Horner passage that was copied, verbatim, from film to film. It was in Aliens, Clear and Present Danger, and ... one other, can't quite remember. But it was the SAME passage on three separate CDs! I didn't mind at all, though. The theme was a minute or two long.
In fact, I felt a modicum of satisfaction that I had been able to discern the similarities as my brother, who'd been listening the CDs years more than I had, had not made the connection.
He's very prolific, you know. He must pump 2 albums out a year. I don't have all his CDs, perhaps a dozen... (I only buy soundtracks from "epic" films.) A lot of Hans Zimmer's stuff sounds similar too--I guess it's just his style.
Also, I imagine it's quite difficult to create minimalist pieces that don't all sound alike. Steve Reich's music? All sounds the same to me. Philip Glass's early stuff sounds almost identical too.
My guess is he probably does what's best for the film. If that means re-hashing some old bits, so be it.
Sergei Prokofiev did this very same thing for his Romeo and Juliet soundtrack in the 1930's. He originally wrote a 3 minute piece for his "Classical Symphony", (an atonal mock-up of Haydn). As he was writing the score to Romeo and Juliet, he found the perfect place, and just dropped that 3 minutes of music in the film, verbatim.
Is that "cheap, unoriginal" music?
All in all, I think that they do what is best for the film, rather than for the 'at-home collector'.
