My point is that I believe even though very smart and dedicated people work in the field, and research it, the "state of the art" seems to be little more than opinion anyhow.

That is to say, it appears to me that even "dense scientific books" are either sharing opinionated descriptive analyses or just making this shit up.

While I can appreciate you trying to defend a field of research, I am also OK with keeping my own mental model of operation.