[kibwen]

> What I find interesting with these transition delimiters is their frequent pairing with an adjective that characterizes the speaker [...] That would explain why he continuously and repeatedly uses them across both poems.

You don't need to speculate, this is known as an "epithet", and is well-studied: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epithet#Literature

[quuxplusone]

And specifically concerning meter, this was Milman Parry's big discovery.

https://archive.org/details/MilmanParryTheMakingOfHomericVer...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry