Q-reeus said:
And if I was in an apparently similar uncharitable and pugnacious frame of mind, I would characterize my opposition here of being narrow-minded 'defenders of the faith' with an unwavering quasi-religious committment to the status-quo.
Q-reeus, one big difference between you and those of us who have been disagreeing with you, IMO, is that you put a lot more faith in your intuition than we do. You come up with an intuitive line of reasoning, and you trust it to give you a reasonably accurate picture of the physics. We don't. We (or at least I, I can't speak for others here) may use intuitive arguments to get started, but I view those arguments as suggestions about where to look in the actual physics; I don't view them as telling me the actual physics. To find the actual physics, you have to look at the math.
Take the example you bring up right after the above quote:
Q-reeus said:
Energy of any kind but particularly here electrostatic field energy, at rest in a gravitational potential (dipole, internal atomic EM fields etc.), is by any reasonable definition, depressed wrt the non-gravitational case.
This is not what the math says. The math says that if you *transmit* energy from one place to another in a curved spacetime, local observers at the second place may measure a change relative to local observers in the first place, depending on how the contraction of the 4-momentum being transmitted with the 4-velocity of the observers changes. The math does not say that "energy is depressed"; that's your intuitive interpretation, which you appear to have arrived at without even looking at the math.
Q-reeus said:
How is this consistently reconciled with the logically necessary RN metric requirement that field strength can suffer no gravitational reduction?
Again, the math does not say that "field strength suffers no gravitational reduction". It says what I said above, about energy being "transmitted", applied to the energy stored in a dipole, and that's all. The part about "field strength being reduced" is, once again, your intuitive interpretation. There's nothing in the math that says "field strength is reduced". In fact, I'm not even sure what mathematical object would correspond to "field strength" in your dipole scenario.
So when you find me objecting to your intuitive arguments, it's because I can't see a way to relate them to the math. And without that, I don't trust them. I recognize that the concepts you are using have intuitive force, and so I am willing to spend time examining how those concepts work and whether there might be some parallel in the math. But if I can't find a parallel in the math, then my conclusion is that the intuitive arguments simply aren't valid.
One final point: why all this emphasis on the math? Because that's what generates the detailed predictions that actually get compared with experiment. That's what justifies our belief that GR is correct within its domain of validity. The intuitive arguments don't play any role in that at all.