There's also the point that she was one of the first pharaohs to hint at personal piety. Essentially, personal piety was an important force that developed much later in the Ramesside period, and was a turn in the religion which allowed 1. a person to directly contact a specific god, and 2. the god to come back to the person and directly do something. It's hard to identify in the texts until you have some practice, but in relation to Hatshepsut, here are the main elements:
1. The elective oracle which the Dier el-Bahari Chapelle Rouge inscriptions represent as an unprecedented event,
2. The Punt oracle, manifesting a divine intention which is not confined to initial installation (ie: creation),
3. The idea of 'divine command', as it occurs in the Speos Artemidos inscriptions: The Hyksos ruled 'without Re' and Re reciprocially 'did not act by divine order' until her own reign',
4. The pictorial cycle of the miraculous birth, which, although in keeping with the classical dogmatic construct of, say papyrus Westcar, expresses direct intervention by one specific god.
In the Chapelle Rouge, she also coins an epithet for a god which expresses the new idea of divine intention in the most concise way: 'he who plans everything existent' (kAi.w n.tt nb.t / kaiu netet nebet):
'Oh my father who plans all that exists,
what is it that you want to come about?
I shall do it according to your order!'
-- ie, 'what do you want? I'll do it'.
Shamelessly summarised of: Jan Assmann, 'State and Religion in the New Kingdom', in J. P. Allen (ed.),
Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt: Yale Egyptological Studies 3, (New Haven, 1989)
So whilst she tried to be a traditionalist and not draw attention to herself (by usually using the masculine pronoun 'I', representing herself as a man, doing traditional stuff), she either intentionally changed the religion, or just showed us that it was changing.
Personally, I think that she had a lot to live up to, so to speak, and thus enabled direct contact with the gods as a new form of legitimacy proof.
