A well-stated post in every way.
" I have my doubts about St. George leashing the dragon with the princess's garter..."
Was that really part of the "official" life of St. George for Catholics? Nothing remotely close to this is recorded in any Orthodox life of St. George that I have ever seen, and I had always assumed that the Catholic Church's life of him was the same. He is one of the greatest martyrs in the Orthodox Church, and other than St. Nicholas of Myra, he probably has the widest veneration across every Orthodox culture of any non-Biblical saint.
This episode of the dragon is in fact a very late development, which cannot be traced further back than the twelfth or thirteenth century. It is found in the Golden Legend (Historia Lombardic of James de Voragine and to this circumstance it probably owes its wide diffusion. It may have been derived from an allegorization of the tyrant Diocletian or Dadianus, who is sometimes called a dragon (ho bythios drakon) in the older text, but despite the researches of Vetter (Reinbot von Durne, pp.lxxv-cix) the origin of the dragon story remains very obscure.