Seven Samurai vs. The Magnificent Seven (problems with the cultural transfer?)

If there is any criticism of this film compared to Seven Samurai in regards to Mexicans and the (mostly) American gunslingers instead of peasants and samurai is that it lacks the class and power structure dynamic. Samurai served feudal rulers and were thus near the top of the social structure. Gunslingers, by contrast, are on the fringes of society even in the States, and had even less status in Mexico. The fear felt by the peasants for the samurai as well as the bandits has more resonance than the fear felt by the peasants for the gunslingers as well as the bandits. In Japan, a samurai could legally kill a peasant for not showing deference, or indeed for any reason. I'm sure Gringo gunslingers did kill Mexican peasants on occasion, but it isn't nearly the same thing as the samurai, who frequently took supplies from the villagers during the many Civil Wars going on in Japan at that time. Again, I'm sure this was done to them once in a while by Gringo gunslingers, but not nearly to the same scale. They had much more to fear from bandits and their own government than they did from Gringos. To further complicate things, the bandits in Seven Samurai, or at least some of the leaders, could well have been former Samurai themselves who went rogue. Since this was a 1960, it was unlikely that they were going to seriously explore the historical between issues of America and Mexico, because that would involve critiquing to some extent the Mexican American War, Manifest Destiny, and Western Expansion. What we did get was a transposition from Japan to America that only partially fit culturally in the transfer, or at least wasn't as potent. The fact that the samurai were serving the top of the social structure WITHIN Japanese society, whereas gunslingers were on the bottom of the social stratum, were outsiders, and only serving themselves, takes away subtext but doesn't really replace it with anything equally powerful. If a Samurai is successful in battle, he serves his lord and has a chance to improve his status and perhaps even become a lord himself. A gunslinger, no matter how successful, doesn't really have that opportunity. The best he can hope for is to change his name and buy a plot of land somewhere, and hope the brother, father or son of one of his enemies, or the law, doesn't catch up with him. The "mixed" character in Seven Samurai is a peasant pretending a samurai in order to improve his social status. The Mexicans gunslingers in Magnificent Seven are outsiders in America, double outsiders actually, since they are both Mexicans and outlaws. Becoming a gunslinger doesn't offer the same advantages as becoming a samurai.