I have LONG held that the pope issue serves as a massive distraction.
I agree. It took me some time to come around to this realization, so I congratulate you. If V2 and the NOM and the new canonizations hadn't taken place, and we had a Bergoglio running around spouting heresies, my attitude would be: "That's not my problem. It's above my pay grade. Let the Cardinals deal with the guy." But they made it my problem when they imposed the NOM and the teachings of V2 and the new canonizations, etc.
There's long been this debate:
SVs: "R&R is sifting the Magisterium, subjecting the Magisterium to private judgment."
R&R: "SVs sift the popes, deciding by their private judgment who is a legitimate pope."
Both criticisms are valid.
But we needn't go there. There is one place on the journey to faith where private judgment does play a role ... as taught by Vatican I. It is the rational judgment regarding whether the Catholic Church has the motives of credibility to be the authoritative teacher of Revelation. This judgment "precedes faith" (as per the Catholic Encyclopedia).
I look at this Conciliar Church and fail to recognize it at the Catholic Church, since it lacks all the marks of the Church. God in His Mercy made it abundantly clear. He could have allowed the Modernists to sneak one error in here, one there, so that over the course of a few centuries the faith would be corrupted in a "boil the frog" manner. But God forced them to change everything so that the marks of the Church would be completely lacking, and so no one would need a theology degree to determine: "This isn't the Catholic Church." That's how the simple faithful (myself included) originally become Traditional Catholics. "Hey, this thing here doesn't resemble the Catholic Church that I know [either from experience or from history]".
I myself became a Traditional Catholic that way. I recall one time during my Jesuit High School years that a teacher showed a video ridiculing the Tridentine Mass, with how the priest babbled in a foreign tongue and had his back turned to the faithful. They made a mistake showing footage of the Tridentine Mass and I immediately fell in love with it. Eventually my family sought out an Indult Mass. Then, away at a Jesuit University in Chicago, I stopped by a Catholic bookstore to get a Christmas present for my Mom. I saw something by this "St. Alphonsus" called the "Glories of Mary." I reasoned that it must be decent if it had been written by a saint. So I got a copy for my Mom and then another one for myself. Upon reading it, I realized, "St. Alphonsus does not have the same faith as these Novus Ordites." I started kneeling for Holy Communion at the NO ... regularly being reprimanded by the NO prelates. Little did I know, my Mom had the exact same reaction, started kneeling for Holy Communion (back home, while I was at college). In any case, after multiple reprimands from NO priests, we realized that these people by and large do not have the same faith that the Church did for its entire history. That was the depth of the "theology" required to make that determination.
It's basically that the sheep know the voice of the Shepherd. We do not hear or recognize the voice of Christ in Montini, Wojtyla, Ratzinger, and Bergoglio. We do not recognize this Conciliar institution as the Catholic Church. No high-level scholastic theology required. We know that this thing lacks the marks and characteristics of the True Church.