Thank you, Stuart. I really appreciate the thoughtful response.

I could not have said it better. While intuition, convention, and tradition works in some areas of life, it most often fails in personal finance, for the reasons you state. We accept so much simply because it sounds sensible and author after author has repeated it enough times. At the very least, we need to consider other ways. They only sound crazy because of what/how we have been conditioned to think.