my understanding of galileo's situation, as you acknowledged earlier, is the traditional view.
i understand that you have your own angle, but it appears to me you are treating the findings of 1615 (re supportive evidence) as if they are some innocent scientific middle ground and then ignoring the 1633 judgement (heliocentric heresy), which is explicit and reveals the strict dogmas concealed under the 1615 statements.
galileo forced the church to make its opinion explicit. maybe by accident as i think he hoped he could persuade them of the truth of his views. but he did so all the same.
my argument, of course, is that the church should have had no standing. it should never have been put in the position to make a judgement. it was not an even-handed arbiter. its politics depended upon a universe that spins around mankind with the pope as intercessor between the temporal and spiritual worlds. of course it was going to prefer the status quo.
this is why religions make lousy judgements about science. they always have unscientific reasons for forming their opinions - namely, the wish to preserve their theology and their authority.
even if you argue, as you do, that galileo's argument lacked constructive evidence in favour of the copernican model, his telescopic observations had smashed to pieces the notion that planets and moons necessarily revolve around the earth. that was the end of the ptolemaic model. the ptolemaic model was the foundation upon which the church's argument rested. in the argument between the two world systems, only one was left in the ring (setting aside the funky Tychonian model).
falsification of an existing theory using evidence. the first step in the scientific process. accomplished. regardless of whether the church's scientists understood what he was showing them.
so a new idea was required. this new idea doesn't spring from the head of zeus fully clad. it requires a tentative hypothesis. an inkling perhaps inspired by a few data points that give rise to a flash of insight. or a gradual revelation as a result of long study. that bit of magic i discussed in a previous post. this hypothesis didn't belong to galileo. it was copernicus' idea. galileo provided some evidence. but kepler probably provided more.
so by the time galileo was tried for a second time, he wasn't merely presenting a theory. kepler's three laws had been written based upon tycho's observations. the judgement of 1615 defining the heliocentric model as lacking an observational foundation was no longer true. the best observations the renaissance world had laid its hands on had been treated by kepler's mathematics and found to support a heliocentric model.
thus, the church can have no excuses for incarcerating galileo. he was promoting a theory for which there was plenty of evidence by 1633. galileo provided some. kepler provided more. it is no wonder they tried to prevent galileo from communicating with kepler. they also feared kepler's discoveries. by disqualifying their exchange, the inquisitors cannot claim ignorance in defence of their judgements. they were actively trying to undermine the case for the copernican system.
galileo thought he could persuade the cardinals to admit the evidence of their senses. that his telescope would make them see that - at a minimum - ptolemy didn't explain the universe. he was wrong. they wouldn't look. nor was he permitted to defend his views before the inquisition.
of course, the church was frustrated that he kept disseminating his ideas. essentially, they were trying to relegate heliocentrism to an allegorical role. that he refused to accept this (until the threat of torture was imminent) is part of why so many folks admire him. such principled, intransigent people are always divisive. note the very different receptions of edward snowden, depending upon one's loyalties.
of course, he (and Copernicus and Kepler) was right that the earth is not the centre of the universe even if his argument was incomplete and contained some errors eg he thought the tides proved the solar orbit.
that he was no diplomat only serves to demonstrate that the church demanded his submission to its view of science. they bullied him into submission.
why should the church be bothered about a person being cheeky about someone he thinks is simple-minded (simplicio)? it is perhaps rude. but galileo correctly identified where the problem lay. with an ecclesiastical structure that was wedded to a theory for which the evidence was weak. how many epicycles does it take before you admit an orbit isn't circular? how do you reconcile an earth-centric universe with the orbit of the galilean moons? how do you maintain the absolute truth of a biblical narrative that suggests the sun moves around the earth?
this, of course, offended the established order and theological type of "science", which turned out to be nonscience when subjected to observation.
but even if it was true that galileo's version of the copernican theory was not observation-based, so what. our idea of freedom, which permits folks to have ideas without seeking church permission, was developed in spite of papal resistance. this wasn't some random bunch of folks disagreeing. it was the papal inquisition.
for myself, i tend to admire a tenacious underdog. i like a system that allows him to maintain the truth of his ideas to the powerful.
sometimes an idea passes through several hands, and is refined each time, before it is more powerful than the ideas which preceded it. you need a guy like copernicus with an imagination, a guy like galileo to argue with the old model, a guy like tycho to provide observational evidence (or in your case, observably correct/useful results), and a guy like kepler to interpret the evidence.
in my view, the church's authority as a scientific organisation was sunk below the water line in the galileo affair.
modern science was born out of the exposure of the church's underlying clockwork and the assertion of freedom from ecclesiastical interference which followed.
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