A very good book to reconcile these perspectives is Rosenberg's own most recent work,
3 Steps to Awakening. From that book, it's clear that he is in line with the subset of Thai practice that emphasizes using the instructions of the sutta to widen out to a panoramic awareness. Yes, he says, you can use the same 16 steps to dive deep into hard jhana, but he considers that an optional development for those who are interested. There are definitely a few pieces of that Thai tradition that think anapanasati will lead you to wide-open embodied choiceless awareness rather than hard jhana, which is just more proof that these suttas have had a lot of readings over the millennia.
The book itself basically says, "Oops. I taught a lot of people via the Anapanasati Sutta, but a lot of my Western students got obsessed with the steps, so I have come up with a pared-down version based on Buddhadasa's concise method of anapanasati." His three gears end up being:
1)Open breath awareness, focused on the whole body breathing. Unlike many versions of the sutta, this version doesn't have you pick a spot to watch the breath but has you just turn your attention wherever it shows up each moment, following the moving target.
2)Panoramic awareness, focused on the whole body breathing including feeling tones, thoughts, and other sensations. Breath is basically held onto as an anchor in the background, while the flow of whatever arises is the main object of concentration.
3)Pure choiceless awareness of whatever arises moment by moment without using the breath as an anchor. If the breath shows up, it's just one more thing that's there sometimes. This section has a lot of focus on the three characteristics.
In this treatment, Rosenberg admits to mostly doing #3 these days, and finding its benefits very special, but he still seems to de-emphasize ranking the gears, because of all the cycles that concentration power goes through.
For me, this system works pretty well, and worked out some of the kinks in my concentration I'd been stuck on the past year or so. But people have radically different ways of learning and sets of mental faculties from each other, so YMMV.