Rent seeking, manufacturing wants/needs, extortion, the list goes on and on, but…

Aside for your idea of "manufacturing wants/needs" (as they are unlimited), rent seeking and extortion (such as subsidies and taxation) are not legit means to profit in a market-setting.

"Those who particularly flourish on the free market, therefore, will be those most adept at production and at serving their fellow men; those who succeed in the political struggle for subsidies, on the other hand, will be those most adept at wielding coercion or at winning favors from wielders of coercion."

You’ve defined capitalism so that all these inevitable features of a capitalist economy are “external factors”.

Corporatocracy is not the same as capitalism. The state is not intrinsically bounded to the formation of markets and voluntary exchange.

because any solution that would end scarcity for a good or service would thereby end profitability for the same.

There is no such thing as a permanent solution to the economic problem of scarcity. Any superabundance theory is destined to fail, such as keynesian economics.

Or in the case of the Great Depression, they’d sooner set fresh produce and livestock on fire than let other consume it without profit to themselves.

The Great Depression represented the most visible sign of a necessary correction in an economy artificially inflated by expansionary monetary policy. The interventionist measures made to boost the economy only drove it further into depression.

"Future recessions can be prevented by reforming the monetary system that creates the boom in the first place."

Markets cost us nothing because they emerge spontaneously? Things that emerge spontaneously cost us nothing?

"We might object to this on the grounds that markets, like any other construct, are man made, and therefore entail a real cost. While it is true that markets are a human construct, we must bear in mind that they are, as Hayek put it, the result of human action, but not the result of human design."