[1787]

I am a little confused by your formulation of relevance, or at least the "to what" implicit in it. If we are speaking of relevance to predicting the future or steering societal opinion I would say the more reductive an argument the better. Not that that's a good thing, but I don't see many recent counterexamples.

Really the above thought is related to the "worth" of views or arguments. I'm not sure there's more than a tenuous link between many practical worths and specialized study in a college.