I hear you on most of those points. The big picture point is the one people need to get and I thought he made it reasonably well.

On your last point, there aren't really any alternatives. A thorough treatment would be well beyond human understanding, so we need focus our attention on what we hope are good proxies for the whole picture. One of the reasons I like Moss is that he often brings in trends that aren't exactly what everyone else seem to be looking at.