Interesting analysis, one comment though: PCA used in this way is not particularly helpful without understanding what the principle components actually mean, e

Interesting analysis, one comment though: PCA used in this way is not particularly helpful without understanding what the principle components actually mean, especially when there's not much structure in the resulting 2D plot. This highlights a broader point, which is that similar analyses are often performed in scientific research. The real utility of the approach is when it is used to recover latent dimensions that help to explain the differences or clusters in data, and then translate these into meaningful and describable features.