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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Theists are wrong; is theism? - Less Wrong
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I still can't parse the maze of "direct" and "indirect" causes you're describing, but note that an event can often be parsed as having multiple different explanations (in particular, "causes") at the same time, none of which "more direct", "more real" than the other. See for example the post Evolutionary Psychology and its dependencies.
Fair enough, but they can often be parsed in terms of more and less directness. For example, say a mob boss orders that Donny kill Jimmy. Donny is the cause of Jimmy's death directly: he's the one that shot him. But if the boss is the indirect cause by ordering Donny: an alternative is that the boss kills Jimmy himself, and then the boss is the cause of Jimmy's death directly.
The reason we don't need to get too metaphysical to answer the question 'Is Aquinas' reply to objector #3 satisfying?' is that the nature of the causes at issue isn't really relevant. The objector is pointing out that God is a cause of my throwing the stone in the same way (it doesn't much matter what 'way' this is) that I am the cause of my arm's movement. If we refuse to call my arm a free agent, we should refuse to call me a free agent.
Now, of course, we could develop a theory of causality which solves this problem. But I don't think Aquinas does that in a satisfactory way.
(Additional bizarre value to this conversation is gained by me not caring in the least what Aquinas thought or said...)
What does "the same" mean? What is a "way" for different "ways" to be "same" or not? This remains unclear to me. How does it matter what we agree or refuse to call something?
Perhaps (as a wild guess on my part) you're thinking in terms of more syntactic pattern-matching: if two things are "same", they can be interchanged in statements that include their mention? This is rather brittle and unenlightening, this post gives one example of how that breaks down.
I think attempts to clarify my argument will be fruitless in abstraction from its context: if you take me to be positing a theory of causality, or to be making general claims about the problem of free will, then almost everything I say will sound empty. All I'm saying is that objector #3 has a good point, and Aquinas doesn't answer him in a satisfying way.
This isn't a special feature of my argumentation: in general it will be hard to make sense of what people are arguing about if we ignore both the premises to which they initially agreed (i.e. the terms of the objector's objection, and of Aquinas's response) and the conclusion they are fighting over (whether or not the response is satisfying). No amount of clarifying, swapping out terms, etc. will be helpful. Rather, you and I should just start over (if you like) with our own question.