I can't reply to all these posts because I'm mobile and I see thumb typing too fast has my shit full of spelling mistakes, but anyway.
I think it can be both true that Carmela is full of shit and she is trapped. I feel at times the whole being over Tony and his shit angle is just her being bored or slightly embarrassed at the time. She is incredibly cheap to keep around considering the cost is her children's lives. However, Tony does get her pegged when he noted that she would never have been satisfied with a square life, with a heart on a chain, or something to that effect.
She knows it's stupid to try and leave, but she also has flashes of having a conscious, at least until she gets a coat or a car or some other bauble to distract her for a while. If she truly despised him she would have just traveled with Rosalie all the time after the kids were grown, maybe always taking them with her, and only come back home every now and then. This is at the very least.
Does her fantasizing about Furio while Tony is huffing and puffing on top of her count as emotional sex in the show?
Richie and Ralph are two of the more interesting and fucked up characters on the show. Ralph specifically for how nonchalant he is about killing his girlfriend's son, but then also his weird affection for Janice, the character I probably hate the most.
I did make a note of the hard on talk with Richie, as well as the blow job scene, and you're right, his homosexuality is never brought up anywhere near as much as Phil's. I think people see him as this tough guy who would never be like that for some reason, when it's obvious he's very butthurt over a man not accepting his clothing gift. Dudes give their letterman jacket for a girl to wear, no wonder Tony didn't want that ugly shit.
Anyway, I agree with the Phil stuff concerning mob rules and decorum. Towards the end the show seemed to point more to how Tony felt in the first season, that being that he came in at the end of it all, when the old bosses were becoming demented or dying and the government didn't even give a shit about the mob anymore because of fighting terrorism. Everything unraveled and then it was over.