also, what opinions of mine don’t hold up to “vigorous torah study”?
you often resort to ad hominem(like now), secular arguments or dismissing the sources in rishonim and achronim that you don’t like in favor of unearthed, forged, or otherwise disregarded sources that maskilim dug up to upheave mesorah. I wouldn’t call that “vigorous”
also, the claim that an ideology can’t be right because it invalidates a large amount of people isn’t a very strong logical argument; maybe a lot of people are wrong? weren’t most people wrong during the churban?
the only issue with saying that everyones wrong is that if that would be the case, the omission of protest from gedolim would imply that they are right, and this is how the defense of minhagim – even to the point of dochek – is justified.
But we dont defend minhagim from amei haaretz, because no such gedolim were around not to protest. there’s no reason to defend not covering a married woman’s hair, because the gedolim at the time protested. there’s similarly no reason to justify television watching, because that too was protested.
making kiddush on schnapps is justified, because gedolim did and saw it, and most were ok with it.
so if the gedolim protested against what the majority of klal yisroel were doing, it would only mean that we should listen to them, not from me as its mouthpiece, but from them.
of course, you probably don’t care much about what gedolei yisroel say, and will counter that the rabbi doctors and maskilim were “gedolim” too, and who am I to say who is authentic and who isn’t
to that I would say, that going back to…say, shulchan aruch’s time, there were few controversial figures. the ones who I say are valid were validated by the ones who followed that time period. the maskilim were derided by the same ones who were validated by those previous generations.