Related: Fake explanation, Guessing the teachers password, Understanding your understanding, many more
The mental model concept gets used so frequently and seems so intuitively obvious that I debated whether to bother writing this. But beyond the basic value that comes from unpacking our intuitions, it turns out that the concept allows a pretty impressive integration and streamlining of a wide range of mental phenomena.
You did that well. It is perhaps unfortunate that people respond more positively to confident assertions than well calibrated ones!
Sometimes the trick is to do things that might get yourself in trouble. You may get in trouble because confident assertions from a (not yet) dominant individual feel like a status incursion that needs to be beaten down. In those cases doing things that push the limits of the status people assign you even though you may experience trouble is a rather direct way of making people give up giving you trouble. You may also get in trouble because you make a mistake. In that case people will be eager to correct you, which leaves both you and the other readers better informed.
I sometimes suspect that 'interesting' is a lot to do with the expected social reward or penalty for paying attention or ignoring the speaker in the context. I have a hunch that if while you were writing your post you imagined yourself speaking in a deep, slow and firm voice then that would have come across in your writing style and made a difference in the mind of the reader.
By the way, I am interested in how you think your 'Mental Models' fits in with 'maps of the territory'. I obviously have my own take but I'd like to hear how it fits in with your mental model of mental models. I obviously have my own ideas but of course I absorbed your 'mental model' description by hacking it on to the conception I already have. ;) Maybe you see it differently!