That I know of, Benedict XVI is the first pope since St. Thomas not to highly praise St. Thomas's philosophy and theology (cf. the testimonies). I can give you quotes of popes all the way up to and including John Paul II (this last studied under the great Thomist Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.) testifying to the superiority of St. Thomas's philosophy and theology, but I cannot find anything similar from Benedict XVI. The closest I can get is the three-part Wednesday audience he gave about St. Thomas's life in June 2010 (part 1, 2, 3), but nowhere does he seem to imply that we should, e.g., "receive from St Thomas himself the principles which act as beacons, shedding light on the more important philosophical questions and rendering the faith more intelligible to our age.", as Paul VI said in Lumen ecclesiæ §29. This isn't surprising since his famous 2005 Hermeneutic of Continuity speech said reason today is different than it was in St. Thomas's time, thus we need a new St. Thomas. Bp. Tissier discusses this in his excellent Faith Imperiled by Reason: Benedict XVI's Hermeneutics, which Bp. Morerod, O.P., recently unfoundedly criticized.

You raise some excellent points here, Geremia.  

If this is true it deserves wide distribution.  I have not heard or heard of one
specific acknowledgement from this Pope or from the cleric Joseph Ratzinger
ever, regarding the importance and value of learning the lessons of the
Angelic Doctor.

From the excellent Sí, Sí, No, No article "The Memories of a Destructive Mind: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Milestones," he actually disparages Thomism (my emphases):

The cultural interests pursued at the seminary of Freising were joined to the study of a theology infected by existentialism, beginning with the writings of Romano Guardini. Among the authors preferred by Ratzinger was the Jєωιѕн philosopher Martin Buber. Ratzinger loved St. Augustine, but never St. Thomas Aquinas: "By contrast, I had difficulties in penetrating the thought of Thomas Aquinas, whose crystal-clear logic seemed to be too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made" (op. cit., p.44). This aversion was mainly due to the professor of philosophy at the seminary, who "presented us with a rigid, neo-scholastic Thomism that was simply too far afield from my own questions" (ibid.). According to Cardinal Ratzinger, whose current opinions appear unchanged from those he held as a seminarian, the thought of Aquinas was "too closed in on itself, too impersonal and ready-made," and was unable to respond to the personal questions of the faithful. This opinion is enunciated by a prince of the Church whose function it is to safeguard the purity of the doctrine of the Faith! Why, then, should anyone be surprised at the current disastrous crisis of Catholicism, or seek to attribute it to the world, when those who should be the defenders of the Faith, and hence of genuine Catholic thought, are like sewers drinking in the filth, or like gardeners who cut down a tree they are supposed to be nurturing? What can it mean to stigmatize St. Thomas as having a "too impersonal and ready-made" logic? Is logic "personal"? These assertions reveal, in the person who makes them, a typically Protestant, pietist attitude, like that found in those who seek the rule of faith in personal interior sentiment.

BTW he was known as the Angelic Doctor because he went
into great detail on the reality of the angels, above all his predecessors
combined, and now we can say even since his time.

Actually, John of St. Thomas (Jean Poinsot)'s Tractatus de Angelis is probably bigger than St. Thomas's Treatise on Angels.

I think he's called the Angelic Doctor because his intellect was almost angelic.