I completely agree with your gist but

whose academic background has fuckall to do with history since he’s a fucking philologist.

Dude, don't do philology dirty like that. They're reading dusty old tomes all day long and you need a lot of historical knowledge to make proper sense of them. We couldn't read hieroglyphics without their work, and their extrapolations have been proven by Hittite (which was discovered after the reconstruction of proto-Indo-European and looks exactly as expected). The two disciplines feed into each other. Dr. Daniel Jackson is a philologist and at least as cool as Indiana Jones and do I need to mention J.R.R. Tolkien.