I have a question. Do you believe the letter "De Unitate" St. Cyprian sent to Rome was a rewrite by the author or a Roman forgery? Also if Papal Primacy was clamed by the popes at the time, then on what authority did the anti-pope Novitian (who was contemporary with Cyprian) believe he could appoint new Bishops all over the Empire against the true pope St. Cornelius? Anti-pope or not, he clamed the authority of pope in a time you believe no such authority was clamed.
Two things. One, you seem to be saying that none would claim authority that was not there. Two, where are your histories of the Popes coming from. You guys quote that stuff as if it comes from authority; but, much if it comes from the Liber and other questionable sources. Much of what made it into the Liber is fiction with regard to your "early popes." What isn't Fraud is legend which means fiction any way you cut it. Where is the authority? I mean without it, you're just making noise and doing nothing else. Where is the authority.
You seem to be arguing at least in part on the basis of a double meaning: I have never denied the primacy of the Orthodox Popes of Rome when there were such things--all of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church considered the Bishop of Rome to be the chief bishop of the Church. I, and all Orthodox Christians who stand within the Church as it exists today, deny the conception of primacy arrogantly invented by later Popes of Rome. You, of course, are fond of pointing to early hints of this arrogance prior to the schism of the Roman Patriarchate from the Church as if they somehow were self-justifying or provided justification for the later full-blown version with its impious self-titling as "Vicar of Christ" and acceptance of a creed different from that given by the Holy Ecumenical Councils.
If the modern Latin conception of the papacy primacy had been held throughout the Church in ancient times, the Sixth Canon of Nicea and the Twenty-eighth of Chalcedon make no sense. The ecclesiology of St. Ignatius of Antioch, in which the bishop, any bishop, is the focus of unity of the Church, likewise makes no sense if the modern Latin conception of papal primacy was believed in his day.
I personally have no opinion as to whether the version of St. Cyprian's writing more favorable to modern Latin interpretations was a forgery or not. As I have told you, the concensus among Orthodox scholars whom I have read is that the later verions which accords well with Ignatian (and thus Orthodox) ecclesiology was written by St. Cyprian as a corrective to the mis-application of "the Chair of Peter" to the See of Rome alone, when St. Cyprian regarded all bishops as occupying the Chair of Peter--their presbyters functioning in each local church as the college of Apostles.