In response to your looper post, point 4 specifically, I came to a similar conclusion, albeit in the completely opposite direction. I thought the entire movie was a character piece (hence why I was okay with a lot of the plotholes) based on Joe. He was raised by the futuristic dystopian culture and not a loving family, yet he yearned for someone to take care of him. When he learned of his future from Willis, that he grows up to find that love...
In response to this and continued in second Reply:
He also finds out that future Joe is willing to kill kids for an off chance of getting it back. Also the movie pays a lot of attention to Joe sympathizing with Cyd. The way I saw the ending was Joe ending the loop of society creating bad people that make up the next generation's bad society. It was a very introspective decision based on seeing a kid he identified with and an older adult he would actually become. That's why I'm forgiving of the half told and plot hole stricken rainmaker stuff.
I've seen others make this argument—that Looper is a character piece—but I don't find it particularly convincing, mostly because Joe isn't a particularly well-designed character. If anything, viewing it as a character piece strengthens my fourth argument, because the only explanation we get for why Joe (original flavor and crispy Bruce Willis style) is a selfish, amoral criminal is that he didn't have a mom looking out for him.
Whether we consider the prediction that Cid becomes the Rainmaker because of Sara's death to be a product of Joe's own preoccupation with abandonment or to be an accurate reading of the future, the conclusion still turns on the mommy issue. The only instance in which this issue might not be considered central is if the film gave us some indication that we're not supposed to empathize with Joe's decision to end the cycle by killing himself—that we're supposed to find his suicide noble and well-intentioned, but futile. And I didn't catch even a hint of that.