That was instructive.
I think the direct reason for your disappointment is simply that the people that would have upvoted you just didn't find the conversation interesting enough to follow. Or to put it differently, they're mistake theorists and didn't see anything there to learn or fix. The other guys don't have to be worse people or less intelligent - just more conflict theorists, which I think they probably are. Ergo more upvotes, even deeper in conversation.
As an example: I realized I didn't even upvote you. I agreed with you, thought your points were perfectly sensible, enjoyed the occasional inadvertent humour ... and closed the window. It didn't even occur to me to "help" your side in the conflict... because I wasn't there to fight a fight. (Took me a year off reddit and on SSC to get to this point, and I'm still more combative than I'd like to be).
Take a look at Nisbett and Mindware. Briefly, if you have enough concepts you can function better.
And a random though I keep having this year - we're not trained to anchor ourselves in time, and this might be a good skill to teach young. To think (and obviously plan) in larger and larger slices of time. Most of what we do long term involves an outside commitment, like "I'll spend 4 years in college". It's not like we even _can_ commit internally to "4 years I'll learn stuff".