There are other aspects to this feeling or sense of regret or state of mourning. For example, it's a core component to various movements that can be labelled romanticism, which in turn cover a whole spectrum of work high, medium and low and takes many different forms from the saccrine to the sublime.
One of the strange things that studying (and doing) the arts teaches, and that is an expansion of states of feeling (expression), the nuances of ambiguity, a kind of fine tunning of sensibility. A metaphor for this expansion is something like the color wheel, where more colors are added for more and more finasse in selection. But this can be carried out ad absurdum until there are distinctions with no difference. A very similar process goes on in poetry and its sense of language, sound, and meaning, again only up to a point
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Sadly, I don't have time for a comprehensive response so the following sketch will have to serve...
If I'm correctly understanding you, you're making the case for the uses of nostalgia as a motivator for artistic -- and perhaps also political -- movement and expression.
I'm sure that's true. I'm sure that in the mind and hands of extraordinary people (famous and obscure) the nostalgic state of mind can produce interesting and important effects.
Even so, I ruthlessly reject nostalgia in its mundane form -- which is what we most commonly experience and witness. I reject it because it tends towards a sort of synaptic quicksand.
My argument with mainstream ecological expression -- trapped in a holographic cube of romantic era elegies for lost innocence and pristine yesterdays -- is chiefly based on a rejection of nostalgia.
The Obama whirlwind which swept up many an experienced and clever left thinker was also, I insist, powered in part by nostalgia (indeed, many of the early, excited posts to this list about Obama breathlessly declared links to glorious movements past).
For now, I won't (actually, can't) go any further and have probably failed to adequately explain my meaning.
Suffice to say that the condition of nostalgia is, like many regrettable things, quite natural but not laudable because of that naturalness.
.d.