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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?
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.

I will say that the Ignatius quote gets weaponized, the hyperpapalism and ultramontanism is a 19th century historical artifact it's not synonymous with Catholicism, there is a level of healthy gallicanism and anticlericalism which was present throughout Christendom, that is, when the Pope or Bishop says some manifest nonsense, "the authority is recognized but the command is not followed".

The real issue is that a lot of the stuff is not manifest. Lots of the stuff Pope Francis said was manifestly heretical and wrong, and I think everyone will agree. But stuff like the validity of ordination rites or the see being vacant or not are obviously not manifest, even if some would like to say otherwise.

The Catechism every Spaniard learned for almost half a millenium has this phrase peppered throughout "a juicio de hombres discretos y letrados", that is "according to the judgement of wise and learned men". I think that is a very wise phrase. We are normal people with jobs and families living in strange times and, even though they may disagree on some things, if you follow people who are intelligent and have devoted their life to study and these questions and always follow your conscience above all (that is, what to your best of your knowledge you believe to be true and the will of God), then nor God nor any honest man can blame you.

So, I've long pointed this out regarding the theological debates among the various Tradtional groups, or even between conserva-Conciliar types in the Novus Ordo, that God Himself, the Holy Ghost, told us through Sacred Scripture that God reveals to the humble and lowly that which He witholds from the wise.

When I first became a Traditional Catholic, there was no analysis of Vatican II and its error, no syllogisms involved, and nothing even close to that.  I had been very poorly catechized in the Conciliar Church and was beginning to just learn on my own.  During my first year at University, attempting to deprogram from Jesuit education (both High School and University, St. Ignatius High in Cleveland and Loyola U in Chicago), before going home for Christmas, during my frequent Saturday morining walks around the area of Chicago where the "Lake Shore" campus was, I stopped into a religious / Catholic(?) book store thinking I'd get a Christmas gift for my parents.  On Saturday mornings, when i didn't have any classes scheduled, I would walk around the Chicago neighborhoods and was stunned by finding, almost every other block, one Catholic church that was simply more beautiful than the next, and thinking that it would cost many millions of dollars to build these today, if we even had the skills left to do it.  I could easily hit a dozen churches in a couple hours on foot.  In any case, I had stopped into the bookstore on one of my walks, and was browsing, and so I saw a book "The Glories of Mary", by St. Alphonsus, and I figured that at the very least it can't be bad since it had been written by a saint.  And I also picked up a copy for myself.

After I went back to school, I began reading the book, and gradually, over time, the realization began to hit me that ... what this man is describing and the faith that every page of the text exudes is completely alien to anything I had ever experienced in the Conciliar Church, i.e where the realization grew that St. Alphonsus was of a different religion than nearly the entire Conciliar Church.  So, even though that wasn't actually mentioned in the book, simply reading it and imbibing his devotion, inspired me to kneel when receiving Holy Communion at the Novus Ordo Mass.  There were some priests who reprimanded me and told me to stand up before they would give me Holy Communion, or, rather, what I thought at the time was Holy Communion.

I called home one weekend and my mother mentioned that she had also started kneeling for Holy Communion, on account of reading the same book, and then the entire family started doing it also, until at one point the priest at the Novus Ordo parish to which we belonged called us in to reprimand us about "this kneeling business".  That man was a total faithless apostate ... but that's for another time (I could go on about him for days ... but he clearly didn't believe in the Real Presence).  At that point, I think we all had had enough of the Novus Ordo, and my family started going to Immaculate Heart of Mary and I to the SSPX chapel in Chicago (then in a rented hotel hall each Sunday).  No "theologizing" needed.

We simply, by God's grace, had our "sensus Catholicus" stimulated, and the only reasoning necessary was "Sesame Street" level logic of "which of these things is not like the other?"  Our Lord told us that His sheep know Him and hear His voice.  We simply know, by faith, that Bergoglio, Prevost, or any of them ... are NOT speaking with the voice of the Shepherd.  That's all that's necesary, and God will reveal to the simple what He withholds from the learned and wise.

Now, there are in fact some very crucial points in the SV vs. R&R debate that really speak to the core of what it means to be Catholic, but even those are issues above any of the minutiae of theologcal argument and can be discerned quite clearly without any deep theological knowledge.

We don't see Our Lord laying down syllogisms in the Gospels, and His teaching has such a profundity that a single sentence of His can result in hundreds of pages in a scholastic theology manual just unwinding its meaning.