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May I ask what groups these are? You do not have to answer.

SSPV is my guess

Since the actions of these current Pope's are contrary to church teaching.

The fist commandment
(...)
The Catechism (Paragraph 841)
(...)
I think that is enough information to step back from those Popes.
(...)
As for exactly how we are to step back that is the problem.  God will guide you to where you need to be.  The best advice I can say is pick a position stay with it until you are sure another position makes more sense  never just follow the crowd.  Be prayerful and humble and God will show you the way.  I have seen many people start at one position but settle on something different than where they started.  Some started indult and ended up Sede.  Some had started out SSPX and ended up indult.  None of us really will know what is 100% correct until a Pope, who corrects the offenses against the first commandment, tells us.

Beautiful arguments. But that's not really what I was asking in my first post.

My problem is that in 99.99% of situations throughout Church history when someone stepped out and said "you broke I commandment" or "the hierarchy is wrong" or "this council teaches error": they turned out to be wrong. Arius, the Eastern schismatics(Filioque) etc.: all of them presented the actual Catholic position as heresy or novelty. And they all had arguments that sounded just as clear and obvious to them as yours do to you.

So I don't really want to get into a debate about interpreting catechisms or quoting councils and popes back and forth. My question is simpler and harder: why should I trust my own (or your) judgment on this? What authority do I actually have to make that call? And since the vast majority of people who ever criticized the Church in this way (who discovered that the mainstream Church was "lying" to them) ended up outside the Church for good, why should I assume that this time it's different? That they all failed to discern correctly, but I (with no theological training) will somehow get it right?

It doesn't require you to have a canon law/theology/history degree, but the essentials are not that difficult to grasp. You need valid Mass and sacraments. You need the truth, the truths of the Faith, unadulterated. You need a real priest.
Yes, the crisis in the church and the modern pitfalls are more tricky than ever. You have to make a big effort to read and understand your Faith.

Look what happened before Vatican II. A lot of 1950s Catholics felt comfortable. They went to Mass every Sunday, maybe even stations of the cross every Friday in Lent. But they became too worldly and did not learn their Faith or teach it to their children. BOOM Vatican II came along and it was taken out from under them. They lost the Faith. They fell along with the crowd. To be Catholic has always required a heroic effort, but it doesnt require a 150 IQ. Some of the most humble and simple have become great saints and stayed the course by frequent prayer, dependence on God, adopting a good spiritual director and setting a rule of life. Anyone can do these things.

The whole point of the shepherd and the sheep is that the sheep don't hold a vote, don't go to the library to verify the shepherd's credentials, don't tell him how to do his job. They follow.

Isn't the Church supposed to be the place where ordinary people can be comfortable - not in the sense of lazy, but in the sense of trusting? Didn't St. Ignatius say something like we should hold that white is black if the Church says so? That's a pretty high bar of trust.

This may be too simple of an answer, but in reality you are not trusting your own judgement on this, you are trusting the teachings of the pre-V2 Church, which teachings let us know that the V2 church is not the Catholic Church.

We know the pre-V2 teachings are true because those Catholics who remained faithful through the revolution of V2, both lay people and clergy, were there to remind us of those pre-V2 teachings, all we needed to do was listen to them - some did, most did not - and here we are.
 

Imagine an Orthodox after 1054:
"This may be too simple of an answer, but in reality you are not trusting your own judgment on this, you are trusting the teachings of the preFilioque Church, which teachings let us know that Rome with its innovations is not the true Church."

Or an Old Catholic after 1870:
"This may be too simple of an answer, but in reality you are not trusting your own judgment on this, you are trusting the teachings of the pre-Vatican I Church, which teachings let us know that the Church with its novel doctrine of papal infallibility is not the Catholic Church."

Or an Arian in 325:
"This may be too simple of an answer, but in reality you are not trusting your own judgment on this, you are trusting the teachings of the pre-Nicene Church, which teachings let us know that the Church with its novel homoousios is not the true Church."

We could do this for 20 centuries of Church history.

Don't get me wrong. I have traditionalist sympathies myself. I'm just getting more and more uncomfortable with making strong claims when the structure of the argument is the same one that every group that ever decided the mainstream Church had gone astray has used.

And at the same time I do feel like I'm being told that black is white and 2+2=5 and that I'm wrong for noticing that something doesn't add up. I don't see the continuity either, and it genuinely bothers my conscience.

But I don't really see any other way to deal with that feeling than to appeal to authority. And especially since Constance, the Church has built up its authority (and by that I mean mostly papal authority) so thoroughly that there's really very little room left for anyone to say "the institution that presents itself as the Catholic Church, that has historical continuity, that has the majority of bishops - that institution is wrong, and I know better."