To what is your goal: Awesome, thanks. I like to know where you are coming from. It helps me tailor the discussion and get to the point.
Where to start. Let's talk about audience for a moment. I think many people give the advice, "Write what you know" because the chances of you fitting into a demographic of people who share some or all of your experiences is likely and you will hit with something that has passion and reliability. But that is a crapshoot.
An audience to me is a group of people who have or have had the same desires and/or fears. They can relate with said desires and fears. As a screenwriter there are certain demographics that people talk about being gold mine genres. They will say things like "Family Safe Tween Romance" or "Woman in Peril Thriller." So women can relate to both of these but tween might or might not relate with "Woman in Peril Thriller." It all depends on what experiences they can reference.
Language is inherently imprecise. This is good and bad. When I talk about an object like a chair your picture of a chair is going to be different than mine. But our ability to generalize what a chair is helps us to understand what we are talking about in the right context. But not all ideas or objects generalize the same across demographics.
Yes, your reader has to feel sympathy for your protagonist's goal. This is the hook that you can then use to create suspense, tension etc. But it's a disassociated state for the reader/audience. They are in second position (it's not happening to them directly). It's more like you are doing something to their friend and they are responding to it.
When you mentioned different sides of theme, I have read scripts where writers have masterfully worked with a ensemble of characters that different audience groups could relate with and have a different experience of the story. The DareDevil series on Netflix did this wonderfully with the protagonist and antagonist until the end of the season where they had to make you hate him as not to split the audience.
I feel Jurassic World didn't get me to like Chris Pratt's character enough. Now, that is my perspective. I might not be the audience they were targeting. Perhaps if I was a PETA member and they were trying to make him a lover of animals and protector of these things then maybe I would feel different but I don't think that was what was happening.
I believe what single most important thing we are trying to control in a script is CONTEXT. Context in relation to our target audience. We can target more than one audience group. Jurassic Park (first movie) had an ensemble that anyone could connect with.
Context defines it perfectly for me because it encompasses everything a script should have. Knowledge gaps and subtext for example. In a great book I read they used the example of a car speeding down a highway and a rabbit in the road. I don't have say anything else do I. You are already deciding the fate of that rabbit. Context. I am leveraging a shared experience that we have. Unless you have never seen a dead rabbit in the road. But this is why I like my definition of audience. If you don't have that fear of the cute rabbit dying then I have not elicited the emotion. Maybe you HATE rabbits.
I have found a perfect way to break up Context in to five parts that you can control. 1. Objects - the things (nouns) that you introduce into your script. 2. Possibility Space - the things that can, could, should or would happen in a given area. 3. Time - the relationship of time to the goal of the protagonist. 4. Energy - what is important in the scene. And 5. Awareness - what you bring to the attention of the reader.
Each of these affect the other. What ever you bring awareness to you give it energy or importance. Those things already have potential energy built into them based on your audiences experience. A gun has potential energy. It creates an immediate future tension of what is going to happen.
Let's take one of my favorite films. Alien.
On a cramped space barge they elicit the claustrophobic energy using space description words limiting the possible places the crew can run from the alien. This context shapes how the audience responds to all the new information they get. Bringing the alien on board. Even if the audience isn't aware of the process deep down they know it isn't going to end well.
I have gone on too long. Let me know if you want to talk about decisions and how they relate to Context.