Greetings, @Sunyo Bhikkhu 
Thank you for the reply. With all due respect, I think there has been some significant miscommunication. Maybe the majority of your reply was written to my older post rather than This main one which you only briefly had time to comment some on after the fact. If so, no worries, and quite understandable!
I would say though that a lot of the points you raise in the above reply are a little baffling in light of that post where I thoroughly discussed how viññāṇa is like a seed that plants itself in our personal chunk of nāmarūpa—many of the same similes and themes you raise I had already discussed in the same way there. It doesn’t seem that there’s any disagreement here about consciousness being established in nāmarūpa according to kamma. These were all comparisons I made as well.
My point was that the suttas consistently do in fact point to nāmarūpa not just being this “mind and body,” but rather all nāmarūpa as you also mentioned: this particular body, for instance, is just as “nāmarūpa-y” as an external nāmarūpa. The external nāmarūpa is also of extreme relevance not only in general but also to paṭiccasamuppāda, which I tried to show with mentions to it. In the Kalahāvivāda Sutta we get an analysis of paṭiccasamuppāda that shows the origin and cessation of dukkha particularly with regard to social quarrels and conflicts. The Dvayatānupassanā Sutta, a sutta about paṭiccasamuppāda, mentions the average worldling taking nāmarūpa to be “the truth” which is actually false according to the noble ones. This ties in with the extremely relevant and important Mūlapariyāya Sutta—where due to perceiving X thing, people take it to be a thing and that percept is automatically conceived of, appropriated, and so forth. DN 15 itself mentions external nāmarūpa in relation to the objects of contact much like most of the suttas that I listed, which seems to be where it most comes up (naturally/expectedly).
Point being, by contextualizing nāmarūpa in the suttas and in relation to phassa and so forth, we get a more complete picture. Viññāṇa establishes itself in nāmarūpa kind of “animating” us if you will. But that also entails viññāṇa encountering the entire phenomenal world of awareness which is all pure nāmarūpa. All of this is what we get attached to, desire over, fight over, conceptualize, make kamma in relation to, and as such the cycle of saṁsāra continues. I really think this is where the original post linked to above would just make this a lot clearer. It was all discussed there so no need to repeat it for the sake of the forum haha.
Also, as an aside: I’ve heard several teachings from Ajahn Brahm about nāmarūpa being the objects of consciousness discussing all of the same things I have done here. This understanding isn’t rebellious, it’s just a wider picture of the usage of the term and its relation to paṭiccasamuppāda And as for mind-objects: Bhante Sujato pointed out that even mind objects are nāmarūpa in a talk, I recall once, as have some other venerables. Thoughts themselves less so, but imagining scenes and daydreaming and so on are all just mental nāmarūpa!
As for papañca not being related to dukkha and some of your other points (like the arahant having pañcupādānakkhandhā), I’d suggest MN 18 where the Buddha specifically connects the cessation of papañcasaññāsaṅkhā to the cessation of dukkha and it is how he sums up his entire Dhamma to a stranger. Also, the cessation of upādāna happens with the cessation of taṇhā. I assume this was maybe a typo and you meant the pañcakkhandhā and not the pañ’upādānakkhandhā which are defined as dukkha in the first noble truth and clearly said to cease throughout the discourses. The plain aggregates without upādāna themselves remain of course. As for the other points like the arahant not dying, I’d suggest reading SN 5.10, SN 22.85 or SN 44.1-11, etc. The arahant is not to be found in any of the aggregates, and the aggregates are what die. The arahant has escaped death, attained to the deathless (i.e. freedom from death). Physically the aggregates all must die, but Nibbāna is not some after-death reward where all the arahant’s agony is released. Things may be dukkha but the arahant is not to be found in, outside of, or in relation to those dukkha things. So in brief, in a conventional sense of course, the aggregates (and thus the arahant, in purely conventional terms) die, but in truth the arahant does not die because there is no arahant to be found. The above suttas are a handful of examples of this. Equating the arahant with the death of the body is like equating yourself with a bunch of random twigs laying on the lawn outside:
But anywho, no disagreement here on viññāṇa establishing itself in a new state of existence via nāmarūpa. I just think there is a core connection—and hence the mention of both meanings of nāmarūpa in DN 15 and throughout the other suttas—because in reality it all ends up being the same old thing: nāmarūpa, internal or external. By craving for the external nāmarūpa, consciousness continues to get established and planted into more nāmarūpa of different existences.
Be well and much mettā!
Apologies if the length of the posts is inconvenient