I don't believe anyone is really arguing how the interaction should be played - FFG made that clear, so as long as you trust the emails, it's settled. The point is more of an academic one over whether the ruling is consistent with the actual abilities, and a more serious one of people trying to contort things around to make it work. This is the danger of a company making rulings which break the rules, especially when those rules are relatively poorly designed. I think "cards can't affect other cards" is a false read on this, and honestly a dangerous one for understanding the rules. But as we get deeper and deeper into it, people get more and more twisted trying to carve out exceptions and make special cases for why THIS isn't actually a counterexample and why THAT still works even though it shouldn't.
My expectations from FFG are not perfection, but consistency. There is no issue of mental ability among the designers in this - they're obviously welcome and able to change the rules when they want. But for some unknown reason, FFG's policy avoids errata like the plague. So instead we get a rash of rulings which violate the actual rules as printed and leave everyone scratching their head wondering if this ruling counts as precedent or not. Given that about 80% of our fine-grained understanding of X-wing comes only from reverse engineering, it's even worse. I, too, would be content with the best that they can do... but FFG, as a company, has proven that they can do much, much better.
"Templating" is a term from CCGs, which X-wing has more in common with than minis games. It refers to how abilities are structured, the use of keywords or icons, and the consistency of grammar. A good (bad) example of this is "immediately". Some cards use it. Some don't. What does it mean? It's never defined, it's not consistent where it's used and where it isn't. The community went around and around for a while on possible meanings, and I believe the current guess is "absolutely nothing". It's a word that has no game effect, changes nothing, adds nothing but confusion, but still appears on a half dozen or dozen cards... just because. Another good example comes from the recent question of Dash being able to "turn off" his ability to ignore obstacles during an action. The response from FFG was that while "may" is defined as meaning an optional ability, sometimes it just sorta means "can" and it's not optional at all. That's very, VERY bad templating.
It's worth taking a few minutes to download the RRG for Conquest and read through it. Apart from just being a pretty good game, the comparison to X-wing is enlightening.