When I'm learning electrostatics I learn that charges come with different polarities. If I later learn about gravity, and that gravitationally everything attracts, this doesn't make the electrostatics wrong! Similarly your debating skills were not wrong, just not the same skills you needed for writing research papers.

In a vacuum, this is certainly true and in fact I agree with all of your points. But I believe that human cognitive biases make this sort of compartmentalization between mental skillsets more difficult than one might otherwise expect. As the old saying goes, "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

It would be fair to say that I believe tradeoffs between epistemic and instrumental rationality exist only thanks to quirks in human reasoning-- however, I also believe that we need to take those quirks into account.