I came instead as a lecturer, prepared for ritualized response. I stand corrected. Habermas believes that modernity has real hope of finding its way to reasoned bases for strong integration of community and for individual freedom. He believes that that hope lies in rational discourse. Never does he equate rational discourse with opinion.
Opinion is too global a term.
Habermas, as a philosopher, is careful to be more specific than that. Opinion, as you seem to have used it, includes beliefs, feelings, evaluations, aestehtics. But Habermas still suggests that they are amenable to argumentation and rationality. Habermas' explanation for how argumentation and reason can apply to what you have called opinion, JAPaul, is that the community of discourse does not refer to ordinary meetings to decide on issues, or ordinary people in a given time and space. It is a community that one can imagine as going beyond space and time.