You just shot your own foot off with that sentence. Find for me one person that insists on two of every species. I'll be waiting.
and then coming to realize the theological message of the Genesis flood story, as a deliberate polemic
BTW, what are your scholarly qualifications that allow you to make such a claim? You can't have any background related to ancient lit or the Bible since the 19th century hypothesis that the Genesis story was borrowed has been thoroughly debunked. IOW, if you were up on the scholarship in this area, you wouldn't have made such a claim.
Also, I did not claim that it was "borrowed" in a simplistic fashion. Source criticism of the Pentateuch has moved beyond the mere isolation of strata. What does seem likely is that the human authors of Genesis 6-9, under divine inspiration mind you, and aware of the traditions about a Great Flood that preceded them and that existed in other cultures, traditions that suggest a certain viewpoint regarding the relationship between humans and God, crafted their own Great Flood story, drawing on similar motifs but radically altering the message.
As for scholarship, a quick review of the books on my shelf demonstrate amazing unanimity on this point: see Blenkisopp (Pentateuch); see Whybray's article, "Genesis," in the Oxford Bible Commentary; see C. Westermann's Genesis 1-11; see the relevant sections of K. Sparks, The Pentateuch: An Annotated Bibliography.