My point about methods may SOUND ridiculous in theory, but go back and read Market Wizards and tell me again how many of the people Schwager interviewed used the exact same methodology or even variants of the same methodology. I'll save you the time and just tell you the answer: Very few. From that, we can deduce that "there's more than one way to skin a cat" in the market. You'd have us all skinning cats in the exact same way, which is actually WAY more reductionist than the position anyone arguing against you is holding.
Also, by the same logic you apply to "objectively programmable TA", i.e. that if such a method were discovered and made public, it would fail to remain successful, so should the same logic apply to arbitrage. It's not as if "arbitrage" is something magical that no one could figure out, unless you are talking about arbitrage in the sense of truly private information. But, even then, it's entirely possible that someone who developed an "objective programmable TA" method would also be able to retain it as private information. In the ES, there are thousands of contracts that get bought at sold at the same time I am buying and selling, almost all of which, presumably are buying and selling for reasons other than my own. How, in the midst of all that buying and selling information, would anyone be able to reverse engineer my specific algorithm and turn it from private information to public information? Yes, eventually I would reach a liquidity constraint and would impact market prices, but it's the freakin' ES.
And I don't use charts, I use T&S for hourly swing trades.
You want to apply one set of rules and logic to that which you think works and another set of rules and logic to that which you don't think works. That's your right, but it's also my right to point out this contradiction. It's also your right not to care if you contradict yourself and it's also mine to think that anyone who contradicts themselves hasn't really thought through the logic of their position or is being intellectually dishonest for some reason. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that last point.
So, that's where I net out on this discussion.
Same thing at the office, I've seen so many people come and go, some of the smartest individuals, who had all kinds of TA bells and whistles in which they believed ... none of them succeeded. The succesful ones didn't use TA.