Agreed. I didn't originally bring up Hancock, another commenter did. My opinion the ton of that comment was to conflate Hancock with the Tepe sites, and discredit humanity having understood the stars far longer than has been generally accepted. There are many mainstream academics doing real research on Tepe. I having done a decent amount of reading of their work (by no means all of it); it does seem that some of the pillars were purposefully arranged to alight with astrological dates.

That really was my point. Humanity has been using astronomy as an exact science for about 12k years. And obviously it's controversial statement.

Also, lastly. Yes, I would agree with you to leave academic process to the academics most of the time. Recently I am sure you're aware of the extremely large glowing gas arc discovery by amateur astronomers. The cloud is about 3x larger than the moon, from our perspective, in the night sky. Totally missed by the actual academics.

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/amateur-astronomers-find-glowing-gas-arc-near-andromeda/