Don't get hung up over "third parties"; the two-party system - with the threat to each main party that it is not guaranteed to remain a main party as a discipline to it - is a good system.Granted that neither of only two parties is ever likely to exactly fit your preferences or mine, the limiting case of rejecting parties is that everyone goes into the ballot box and writes in his own name - resulting in a tie.
Granted that neither of the two main parties may nominate the best person for the job. But what system actually can place the best person in the job??? If there are even as few as three choices to select from, there is no principled way to gurantee that the best candidate will prevail. If one gets 45% of the vote and another gets 40% of the vote, are you guaranteed that the candidate who only got 15% of the vote is not the most acceptable to the most people? Or that he is?
If you do not have word directly from God, you will always be reduced to voting for one fallible person or another (or, if you consider "third parties," another or another or another . . .). Better we have two parties which cull our choice down to manageable proportions, and hold those two parties responsible for their choices. Which is why I found the decision of the NJ Supreme Court so offensive back in '02 when it allowed the Democratic Party of New Jersey to replace its nominee on the ballot after the deadline to do so had passed. Doing so "gave the good people who vote Democrat a real chance" - but it allowed the Democratic Party to escape the consequences of its own venality in renominating a crook (Robert Torricelli) to be its candidate for the US Senate.
I'm not hung up over third parties.
As a conservative, I'm all for competition and I think that we certainly get a fair dose of that in our current system.
I agreed with most of what you said, so I'll leave it at that. Thanks.