Admittedly, yeah. I just couldn't resist leaping to the defense of one of my favorite anime OSTs. I suppose that, most significantly, it's a purely arbitrary comparison. I suppose that the urge to compare them partially has its origins in the idea that it's a valid comparison because it's a comparison between the (arguably) "best"/most acclaimed/culturally significant/etc. mecha works from their respective cultures, but this doesn't work because Pacific Rim, essentially being the only major Western work of its kind, earns all of these superlatives and titles by default. This isn't to say that Pacific Rim isn't good, but it's not really culturally or critically parallel to Evangelion in any significant sense.
Furthermore, it's understandably unfair to compare a two-hour film to a 26-episode television series because, in most cases, of course the much longer work is going to have more variety in its score. This isn't giving a pass to Pacific Rim because there are many films of the same length with extremely memorable scores, but scoring is also dependent upon the content and tone of the source material. Pacific Rim isn't exactly diversely emotionally evocative, nor does it meander into a wide variety of subplots. It's a laser-focused work with a simple and consistent tone, and in that sense the FUCK YEAH EPIC BLOCKBUSTER sound is functional for what it is.
I suppose it's also worth mentioning that Sagisu took a lot of cues from 80s mecha scores for his work in Evangelion, which I suppose was an important aspect of the genre deconstruction/subversion/whatever the hell it's considered acceptable to call Evangelion in reference to other mecha these days. It was a different time in a different culture and understandably Evangelion's score at least partially reflects what was considered a "mecha store" for an 80s/90s Japanese mecha anime. Likewise, Pacific Rim is scored in keeping with what's considered acceptable or appropriate for an 00s/10s Western blockbuster film score. Two works falling under the extremely wide umbrella of the mecha genre is not in and of itself enough to carry any sort of expectation that the works will have similarities in how they are scored.
