I describe Aquinas’ approach as “contortions” because although he desires to use Aristotelian terminology, by his own admission he reverses the sense of accident and substance as it would have ordinarily been used by Aristotle and his contemporaries:
“Therefore, in this conversion what takes place is the contrary of what usually takes place in natural mutations, for in these the substance persists as the subject of the mutation, whereas the accidents are varied; but here, conversely, the accident persists, the substance passes.” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Four: Salvation, Chapter 63 [9]).
In effect what this does is add a hyper-sophisticated, distortive, and inherently materialistic filter to a phenomena that Christ Himself said could only be comprehended spiritually, as by the spiritual mind, and not the carnal mind. This seems better suited to an advanced system of sacerdotal dependence than the egalitarian faith of Galilean fishermen. And so I think it is proper to call it a contortion.
BTW, just as a technical correction, as far as I am aware, no Scripture describes the bread and wine transitioning from one state to another. Always the present tense is used. There is no sense of “becoming.” That is a later modification necessitated by moving toward the inherent materialism of transubstantiation. In Scripture, though the bread is blessed, it is never one thing, then later something different. It is always described as simply being whatever it is, in a timeless state. Which is perfectly compatible with a memorialist view, or even a spiritual presence view, but not with transubstantiation, which insists on a process of change.
BTW the most accessible (heck, even I sometimes almost understand him!) modern exponent of Scholastic Realism is Feser, whose The Last Superstition very good. He write like the love child of Aquinas and Ann Coulter. So he's fun.
A blessing in my life is that after an adolescent flirtation with the Existentialists, my serious encounter with philosophy began with Plato. So "my system was flushed " enough that when I came to "substance " in the Scholastics, I was thinking hypostasis " and "ousia " not "hyle" or "materia".
I think that the modern confusion (by "modern " I guess I mean Post-Reformation) largely arises from the triumph of Nominalism, which has not been utterly useless but has prompted a lot of erroneous thought.
For example, my FIL, who is fighting his last battle as I type, THOUGHT he believed in transubstantiation. In fact, he believed in something the Church never taught, a kind of trans-materialization!
I hope I get the chance to talk more with you about this, but in a few hours I will be driving to be with him.