As ridiculous as FE seems, prima facie, until it's proven false, I keep my mind open to plausible explanations for why:
A) the moon landings were all fake and we've never "been back"
B) there are no actual photos of the entire earth from space (unless you believe the sizes of the continents are changing by 30-60% every decade or so)
C) the only people on earth that we give billions of dollars to, to go to space, are faking any, let alone much (or all) of the footage, using green screens, parabolic "zero gravity" flights, actual hair spray to make their hair stand up, underwater studios (unless you believe in air bubbles in space)
You might say "but these items have better explanations than FE". Well let's hear those theories also. Let's not shoot down those who are proposing an outlandish, yet mostly comprehensive, theory, one that explains these anomalies as well as a plethora of others, like how did they use radio frequencies that don't even purportedly bounce off the ionosphere to communicate hundreds of miles during WWII, how can the horizon be seen above an item whose entirety should be hidden behind it, why is Antarctica, aside from a tiny portion, entirely off limits to most civilians, how was Felix Baumgartner able to slowly float up to nearly 30 miles without drifting a thousand or more miles because of the earth's rotation, etc.
Suggestions that these things are not even worthy of discussion, on a forum dedicated to conspiracy theories, have to be disingenuous.
Original Research
Let's not also forget that FE researchers are literally the only conspiracy theorists doing original research. These people will buy lasers that cost thousands of dollars, cameras, etc., and go to some large body of water (large lakes, bays, etc.) where they can test their hypothesis with an actual experiment. Everything else I see on here is pure speculation, or videos of interviews involving various professionals with dubious backstories (Malone, etc.).
Does it Matter
Pertaining the "would it even matter" argument, you honestly don't need a lukewarm IQ to imagine how much it would matter, if FE was real.
Principles
Most of us are here because we couldn't speak freely elsewhere, because "hate has no place on our platform" type communist bullshit. Now we're going to make the same kind of rules, especially banning arbitrary content that is desired by a clear majority, on a platform with already-existing mechanisms for getting rid of low quality postd (downvoting, hiding)? If FE posts are banned, this place is no better than TGA, and don't even pretend to be pro constitution when you can't even stand up for free speech about a conspiracy theory in a conspiracy theory forum.
I'm out of here, for good, if FE is banned. Aside from spam, illegal, doxxing, banning has no place on our platform.
I don't have any hostility toward you. I've seen your posts on here in the past and I know you're not a shill. You're just frustrated at FE posters.
However, according to your logic herein, it would be more reasonable to assume NASA and the entire space edifice is perpetuated simply to convincing us that they can put people in space and take photos from space than it would be to assume they are hiding something bigger.
What I am suggesting is that these lies from NASA and the space edifice, as a whole, are cause for concern enough to justify looking into any theory that could possibly explain these lies. One such theory is flat earth. The reason I think this is worth exploring is because none of us have the ability, realistically, to go up and check for ourselves. Most everybody that many of us will ever talk to in the span of our lives believe what they believe about the shape of the earth and about outer space, not because they've observed it up close themselves, or even with a telescope in most cases (the majority have only looked up at the sky from the ground), but instead because of what they were taught by the government (public school, NASA, mockingbird media, etc.).
None of this is evidence that the Earth is flat, and I never claimed that it is. But what it is evidence of is a deception so vast as to span generations and consume budgets aggregating to trillions over its lifetime. I think that the most likely version of our earth is a planet orbiting around a star, because it seems to make sense, based on what we see from the ground. However, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that I am wrong about this, including, but certainly not limited to, some of the things that I mentioned in the paragraph below my A B C list in the OP. Keeping obvious spammers off the platform (people copy paste spamming over and over all day and upvoting themselves from alt accounts, etc.) will allow for Real discussion well preventing people like you from being frustrated by a constant barrage of spam.
The missions would not consume those trillions. Only a percentage, enough to pull off faking them. NASA is a front. The reason the fakes work so well is because they can invest a lot of money into them, far more than any Hollywood production for each mission, and still make off with the extra billions. And those productions justify the next billions, and so on. You know NASA is also one of the main drivers of Climate Change narrative? These are the conspiracies NASA is about. Filtering money elsewhere (investigating where would be an excellent use of everyone's time), protecting the original Moon landings since their entire legacy is built on them, and legitimizing creation of carbon markets and C02 as a pollutant and such.
FE is a massive distraction. Literally a huge void of time wasting waiting for the curious to topple into and never emerge - and while you wade through the countless lies and misrepresentations FE'ers have come up over the years and are repeated by their followers ad nauseum, trying to see if they make sense, the production line is brain farting out even more.
I don't know what it's called, but this is the most corrosive fallacy of FE and beyond.
Yes, we abso-fucking-lutely can prove (insofar as anything outside of pure math can be proven) the shape of the earth without going into space. Because we can see our relationship with other objects in space, we can show that every observation of them we make alignes with the sphere shape model using well-understood geometry.
All these FE "free thinkers" love to tell others to "do your research" but not one of them has bothered to actually learn the math that they would need to prove either model. Honestly, I haven't either, but I know enough to prove that FE is obviously impossible because it really is that easy (grade 10 math). Really, any 3D shape but a spheroid is obviously out of the question, which is why they picked a 2D shape instead.
We can't see atoms either, and we never will, but we know they exist amd have certain properties because we can observe the results of those properties. FE is basically alchemy, in this metaphor; it can explain some things, but atoms explain those things, and many more. Shortcomings in atomic theory don't a) prove that it's wrong, merely incomplete, b) justify using an obviously incorrect replacement or c) indicate a conspiracy.