Let's go back to the Tom Brady example [1]. The last pick in the draft isn't coming from someone who was already at the top of his game. It's coming from someone who before that point had a history of not being top of the pack both on his high school team and college team. Would you say he's in the top 10,000 football players when he has NEVER been a starter?

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Brady began his football career as the backup quarterback on the Padres junior varsity team. At first, Brady was not good enough to start on the 0–8 JV team, which had not scored a touchdown all year.[25] Brady ascended to the starting position when the starting quarterback was injured. He became the varsity starter in his junior year and held the position until he graduated.[26]

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Brady played college football at the University of Michigan from 1995 to 1999.[41][42] After redshirting in 1995,[43] Brady spent the next two years as a backup quarterback, while teammate and future NFL quarterback Brian Griese led the 1997 Wolverines to an undefeated season, which was capped by a victory in the Rose Bowl and a share of the national championship.[44] When he initially enrolled at Michigan, Brady was seventh on the depth chart, and he had an intense struggle to get some playing time. At one point, Brady hired a sports psychologist to help him cope with frustration and anxiety; he even considered transferring to the University of California, Berkeley to play for the California Golden Bears.[45][46]

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With Tom Brady, you have someone who objectively, quantitatively and qualitatively, was not top of the pack in high school or in college or at draft, the formative years where the wheat is physically supposed to separate from the chaff. And yet, he ended up developing into the best player of all time.

More generally, I'd say that it's not a strawman when someone points out where you're not engaging with details and concrete examples someone else is bringing up. It just means that at best, you don't think it's worth your time to engage with the details, or at worst, you just don't think that rigorously.

I'm not here to tell you how to live your life. It's yours to live and not mine. But my unsolicited advice is that you'd probably live a more fulfilling life if you did a better job at reading between the lines and absorbing the detail from those that disagreed with you, rather than defensively taking it as an affront towards your character. I've made clear at multiple points that I agree with a lot of what you said, but disagree with enough of how you get there to voice it over because I think it's based on risky assumptions. I've also cited really specific examples so that we're not arguing on rhetoric, but you refuse to return in kind. Why do you feel above needing to explain with evidence and substantiation, and detail? There is no need to feel shame at being wrong. None of us are perfect. Changing your mind isn't proof of being unintelligent; on the contrary, it's proof that you're awake, aware, learning and growing. The "smartest" and certainly the most successful people do this the most, not the least.

At this point, I've said my piece. If you want to ignore evidence which is inconvenient to your conclusions, then be my guest, but ironically then, you'd be guilty of "when the activity is intellectual, rather than physical, however, people tend to react more emotionally, or allow their ideology to overshadow some hard facts about human existence."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Brady