Always_Ask_Questions,
“I personally was involved in a couple of competitive intellectual pursuits over years, so I know what I don’t know reasonably well.”
I’m not sure you are getting the point of why it’s important to ask a shaila regarding skipping kaddishes. This isn’t about how much you know. You may well know of opinions that allow skipping things in davening, but if you really felt sure about the ground you stood on, you wouldn’t be writing things like the gabbai sees me do it but doesn’t object – that’s rationalizing. In fact it’s even worse, because you’re essentially relying on a gabbai who doesn’t even know he’s being silently asked a shaila for your psak rather than directly asking a rav. When you paskened skipping kaddishes for yourself, you did what you thought best and followed your own will. Our goal as Jews is to follow Hashem’s will. We put Him in the driver’s seat, not drive ourselves and hope He came along for the ride because the gabbai didn’t object. And the best way to do that is to ask a shaila of a rav who is not nogeia b’davar. Asking shailos isn’t always because you “don’t know.”