User, rav boruch ber DID dance with a sefer of torah sheball peh on simchas torah – gra”ch al harambam. He felt that it was the shpitz torah she baal peh. He would dance with both the sefer Torah and his rebbes sefer at the same time.
Also, how is gemara any less the word of God than chumash? That’s very not Orthodox. If anything, a line gemara represents God’s will in the revealed sense, because it’s more accessible and clearer than what Hashem hid inside the pesukim of tanach.
My point about the seforim we learn isn’t that they’re to the exclusion of tanach. Let me clarify – if a person reads tanach, he will not grasp even one basic notion of yiddishkeit the way he’s meant to. He might come away thinking all sorts of apikorsus too, like naaseh Odom, yad Hashem, etc…
What you DO get from learning the seforim, is yiddishkeit. They quote pesukim and chazal all the time, but they’re explaining what those pesukim and maamarim mean, as opposed to the blind study of it alone.
Even with rashi, you’d need to be quite a talmid chochom to erect a Torah worldview from tanach itself; you gain much more yiras shomayim and daas Torah from sifrei mussar and hashkofa.
It’s not belittling tanach chas veshalom, it’s belittling our lowly place in the way we relate to it.