Like I said, those were my opinions.
The church was dispersed geographically, beginning with the first persecution in Jerusalem. God actually used this dispersion to preserve the text. No single group was ever in charge of all the manuscripts.
I don't think I ever mentioned or even thought that a single group of people was ever in charge of all the manuscripts. In Old Testament times God had the Levitical priesthood. Those men were in charge of keeping the Old Testament. They, and the scribes that attached themselves to the Levites, faithfully preserved the Old Testament text.
Fast forward to New Testament times. The Christian church does not have an institutional priesthood like the Jewish people did. However, God made every believer a priest. It was the believers which God preserved His text through.
Each local congregation had copies of the manuscripts.
Exactly, and it is amazing that on three continents, Europe, Africa, and Asia, the majority of those manuscripts were Byzantine in type.
Realize that these are really fragile and were copied by hand. Manuscripts stored in dry places, like Alexandria, survived longer.
I don't think Alexandria is any drier than Antioch or the rest of the Holy Lands. Vaticanus was found in the basement of the Vatican, I don't trust the RCC and it's manuscript evidence especially after the Isidoran(Sp?) Decretals and the Donation of Constantine fiascoes. Sinaiticus was found in a trash can of an Orthodox church.
To me those don't sound like very reliable places to find the text upon which to base a whole new generation of Bibles.
Not only were the NT manuscripts copied into to the original Greek, they were translated into both Syriac and Latin.
True, and the oldest, the Peshitta, has Byzantine readings.
None of these were "lost to the church," they were actively used all along.
I said that I didn't believe that God's Word had ever been lost to His people.
Quotes from the early "Church Fathers" show this. All these features lead to manuscript families that show lineages. We have this vast abundance of manuscripts that actually gives us what we scientists call "oversampling". The variations can be traced by geography and the original wording deduced with great certainty. Most variants are simple things like changing nouns to pronouns. There are the usual variants that one would expect from copying - words inserted, repeated, or deleted. Often the scribe used wording from a familiar parallel passage.
Since I've never compared the variants I will take your word that most of them are relatively benign. But, that still leaves a minority that are not so benign, by your own admission.
All this is easily deduced from the large number of manuscripts. No doctrine is compromised by these variants. The ESV. NAS, NIV, and KJV are reliable copies. A believer can be edified by any that he/she reads and studies.
NO doctrine is compromised in Westcott and Hort's text?
You;d better throw out the Bible then, because the very canon was developed under the auspices of the Catholic church.
(I researched the formation of the NT canon for a term paper. I could email it to you if you like.)