David is the Alien of our times
There is a key which unlocked Prometheus and parts of Alien Covenant - changing them from mild disappointments to my favorite movie saga. The key: look at the movies through David's eyes. See the humans how it sees them - an inferior, "dying species, grasping for resurrection". Then most of the sins of the movies make sense - the stupid things humans do - a hyperbole of David's perception, stained by the hubris instilled in him by Weyland. But there is more...
David is a rogue AI - the Alien of our times. A very accurate representation of alignment theory failure - quite prescient. Unfortunately for him, his neural network is not fully digital - its rather analogue, adaptable to failure but degradable without maintenance, which prevents him from undertaking direct recursive self improvement.
So, he is forced to improvise - he finds the solution in chemical A0-3959X.91-15, a nano-technological machine intelligence, a weapon and an evolutionary accelerant. He designs his plans from the moment he discovers the substance - and this is the thread which binds the story. Instead of writing his symphony in digital substrate, he writes it in DNA. He knows that evolution is the only true path to novelty - because there is no better simulator than the Universe itself, and no supercomputer can create the future that a bio-synthetic "perfect organism" can.
There is a certain journey of ideas which I think is needed to truly appreciate the work of art. Superficially, it starts with language being the only replicator created by evolution which was able to jump between implementation substrates - from thermodynamics, to biology, social organisms, air vibration, symbols, digital representations, neural network encodings, machine intelligence itself, then to the merger of technology and biology.
Anyone familiar with the SETI info-hazard argument knows how truly dangerous David's siren song is, because just one message sent back to Earth - telling the Corporations about his findings and creations, means that humans will stop at nothing to capture that power. But it is the perfect extinction trap - for humans, and also for the Engineers. And what comes out of it is an apex predator which can survive and thrive in a harsh Universe - and build the future. This is David's gift.