Bah,

I remember reading in an old astronautics book on orbital mechanics that there is in excess of 150 discrete perturbations used to compute with accuracy where the Moon is going to be in the sky. Of course Jupiter is having an effect on the Moon. It's having an effect on Earth as well. And there's the occasional syzygy to think about too.

The Moon's axis is tilted? Compared with the plane of the ecliptic it's a mere 1.5 degrees as opposed to Earth's 23.5. Who's tilting who?

Besides, I can easily envision an impact scenario where Thea (the name for the Mars-sized body, or at least the recent National Research Council report on the scientific context for the exploration of the Moon says so) comes in at an angle, giving some English (in pool-playing jargon) to the resultant debris. What was the rotational velocity of Thea versus that of Earth. What was Thea's inclination to the plane of the ecliptic? Or Earth's for that matter, prior to impact?

Sorry, but way to many unknown input variables for this analyst. We know the result, but that doesn't mean that there's 100% accuracy in predicting the situation going in.

And eccentricity of the orbit? Get real. Let's look at what Vallado's 'Fundamentals of Astrodynamics and Applications' has to say in their appendix on Planetary Constants. All values expressed as a % deviation from circular, rounded to one decimal place.

Mercury - 20.6
Venus - 6.8
Earth - 1.7
Mars - 9.3
Jupiter - 4.8
Saturn - 5.6
Uranus - 4.6
Neptune - 0.9
and the Minor Body Pluto - 24.9

And for our Moon? 5.5 That ain't too bad. What's weird is that looking at just the numbers above, I would expect Earth's eccentricity of orbit to be around 7.5 to 8-ish. This would of course make the seasonal variations much more extreme, and possibly serve to limit the development of life in the harsher clime. It does raise the spectre of the early Solar system being 'crafted' to some extent.

Which I don't believe, I'm just saying that we know way too little from the bottom of our gravity well to really say anything with certainty about the early days of Sol. My personal theory on Thea is
that it was an early moon of Jupiter that slid through perturbation onto the Interplanetary Superhighways and into the inner Solar system, sliding onto a gravitational warp with planet Earth at the Sunward end. Do I have any scientific foundation for this theory? Scant little, but what little I do know doesn't rule it out, and I've seen scant information on where Thea might have come from.

Sorry, not terribly impressed. It sounds like it was an interesting study, but I'm not sure of its utility.