No problems with your passion and you've been both interested and engaged. I don't doubt that the badge consultation was probably done after most of the decisions had been made but I take a less cynical view that the club probably had a few candidate designs and tried to use the consultation to make a choice. It's not a vote but it is still better than a unilateral change without consultation.
Your biggest fear seems to be a badge with too many symbols. Gav does tremendous work and I'd probably have more than a dozen of his designs as our badge tomorrow if they were proposed. But the club were never going to simply use a badge created on here and just because Gav couldn't make multiple symbols work doesn't mean another designer might not. It's not fair to convict the club ahead of time.
More importantly, as someone who has participated in many of these exercises through the years, it's just inevitable that there will be an alternate design by Gav or someone else that you think is perfect and that whatever the club has come up with is inferior to that design. This is natural but this is all the more reason why you don't float multiple designs in public. I'm even hesitant to show multiple designs to key stakeholders in a decision making process because they fall in love with one of them and can't accept that another design serves the purpose better.
I know you more or less understand this and have mostly said as much. You're a smart guy who hasn't gone off rails on this topic at all. It's just an incredibly complex topic and it is impossible to achieve universal acclaim. No matter what, we are likely to have a substantial improvement on what we have today. No matter what Esquer says.