The substance of your statement basically amounted to an empty ad hominem against amateur theorists.

It was rather tongue-in-cheek than ad hominem, and intentionally so. But empty? To make up a wrong explanation which could sound convincingly to amateurs is quite easy in any science, evolution theory included. It is already acknowledged here in case of evolutionary psychology, but the arguments are valid generally for evolution.

In the retina's case, what we are really discussing is whether the backwards retina is a suboptimal design. But to prove that, you have to prove the existence of a more optimal design. Biologists haven't done that.

First, I have made no statement about optimality of retina, and I don't disagree that the question may be more complicated than it seems on the first sight. In fact, it was basically my original point.

Second, all designs are almost certainly suboptimal. Optimal means there is no place for improvement, and the prior probability that evolution produce such solutions is quite low. It is also not so hard to see why humans can sometimes notice suboptimality in evolved adaptations: evolution works only by small alterations and can be easily trapped in local optimum, overlooking a better optimum elsewhere in the design space. That's why I was puzzled when you have written

an evolutionary adaptation that looks maladaptive to us is more likely caused by our current technical ignorance than actual maladaption

I interpret it as "we can never confidently say that any adaptation is suboptimal", or even "everything in nature is by default optimal, unless proven otherwise", which is a really strong statement. Do you maintain that the perceived maladaptivity of human appendix is also probably an illusion created by our insufficient knowledge of bowel engineering?