The best scholarship I've ever read abut the formation of the Canon was "Whose Bible Is It?" by Jaroslav Pelikan.
Pelikan's immersion in Protestant and Jewish Scriptural studies, and his knowedge of Greek and Latin, and of Hebrew and other Ancient Middle Eastern languages is daunting: the "Whose Bible" book is good point of entry.
Pelikan began his theological research career as a Reformation scholar. His dissertation was on Luther and the Confessio Bohemica and he remained a Lutheran and a Reformation expert through the first seven decades of his life, before being received into the Orthodox Church at, I think, the age of 75.
I relate all this about Pelikan because the one thing he never was in his life, is a Catholic. And he's my main source.
Since I'm no scholar myself (my Hebrew doesn't go beyond "Baruch ata Adonai Eloheinu, melekh ha'olam") I have to rely on various people who are.
At this point, any discussion between you and me on the canon, would be volleys of paragraph-long quotes from people we consider good scholars, the first salvoes of which you have already lobbed over the wall. Since you have pre-judged and pre-rejected my own position as "Catholic propaganda," I do not sense much likelihood of open, respectful discussion.
So I here I must say bye, I have sweet potatoes to mash.
My response to your statement, "If you have the abridged version (66 books), you're...." was my first sentence (which I now see was in dire need of proof reading in order to correspond to my mind), and what followed after that was,
For those who want to protest, read here first, RC propaganda has been refuted time and again here on FR by the grace of God.
Thus refutation of RC propaganda is directed toward those who employ such arguments as are refuted, and if the show fits, wear it, but seeing as you did not post anything more than a denigration of those who hold to the more ancient OT canon, than you should get huffy unless you do argue according to the standard RC apologetics, beginning with, "the canon was settled until Luther threw books out of the Bible."
I relate all this about Pelikan because the one thing he never was in his life, is a Catholic. And he's my main source.
Which is simply wrong and or elitist, since "Whose Bible Is It? A History of the Scriptures Through the Ages " was published in 2005, 7 years after Pelikan went from being a Lutheran to a Orthodox, and which is officially called the name of which is Orthodox Catholic church, even if RCs want to restrict the Catholic title to themselves.
But if you can esteem Pelikan before his declension into the Orthodox church, which many Catholics attack, then you have to deal with such conclusions as,
"Recent research on the Reformation entitles us to sharpen it and say that the Reformation began because the reformers were too catholic in the midst of a church that had forgotten its catholicity..."
“...To prepare books like the Magdeburg Centuries they combed the libraries and came up with a remarkable catalogue of protesting catholics and evangelical catholics, all to lend support to the insistence that the Protestant position was, in the best sense, a catholic position.
“If we keep in mind how variegated medieval catholicism was, the legitimacy of the reformers' claim to catholicity becomes clear. - The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (New York: Abingdon Press, 1959) , pp. 46-47
Now eat your potatoes.