I'll cop,on behalf of the Catholic Church to trying to nail down every little nuance, but I say again, that was because controversies arose and in their arguing it was clear that the Good News would be compromised. The nuance nailing was in response to controversy and in order to protect the Gospel.
Consequently, IMHO, it's not a waste of time.
YOU're saying, I think, leave those dusty volumes and attend to my intuition: "Jesus was in some ways less than God."
WE're saying, "Indeed, in some ways he was. We went over that in pretty much detail about 1,500 years ago. You might be interested in what we concluded and why we concluded it. But, regrettably, it does involve dusty volumes."
Actually, when God says,
that HE SET CHRIST above all principalities and powers . . .
I don’t see any sense to saying that Christ is less than God.
Certainly . . . in some clear respects, THE FATHER is at the top of the Heavenly power structure.
Yet, when HE DECLARES AND CHRIST DECLARES THAT THEY ARE IN ONE ANOTHER—I think that kind of levels the field amongst the Trinity. Particularly when God declares that one can blaspheme Christ and The Father and receive forgiveness but not if one blasphemes Holy Spirit.
I don’t know that we can have successful exhaustive assumptions about all the particulars of the Trinity. However, we can believe Scripture, which I do.