Have you ever published in a peer-review journal? If not the last portion of your post I will ignore, if so perhaps your could expound on it a bit more.

The actual experience of publishing a paper hardly adds anything that can't be understood without doing so. Peer-review is not about "critics" responding to endorsement by well-known figures, it's quality control (with whatever failing it may carry), and not a point where written-up public criticisms originate. Science builds on what's published, not on what gets rejected by peer review, and what's published can be read by all.