Diana, I think you express yourself very well.
I respect what you're saying and I sympathize with much of it. From your post, I think you agree (please correct me if I'm wrong) that while modern decks have been specifically designed to convey divinatory meanings, classical decks have not (at least, not the pip cards). So, it seems to me that
any DMs that we assign to the pip cards will be in some sense foreign to them. The only way we could work with the cards so as to truly respect Nicholas Conver (if that's who we decide to consider as the creator of the first Marseilles) is by playing games with them.
I could understand your position better if you used only the pictorial details on the pips to interpret them. But you also use the corresponding Major cards to interpret the pips, and by doing so you're introducing an element which is foreign to the pip cards themselves. Since they weren't designed to convey DMs, then
any assignment of DMs to them will introduce something foreign. However, I do think that if someone used only the pictorial details, it would be a valid argument for that person to say that using RWS/GD meanings wouldn't make sense. My argument is that using RWS/GD meanings doesn't make any more or less sense than using numerological associations derived from the Majors.
Personally, I believe that a hypothetical Rennaissance person who was hypothetically going to sit down with a set of Marseilles pips and give them divinatory meanings would be just as likely to use number meanings derived from astrology, say, or the Bible, which Rusty Neon has suggested as a possibility, as to derive them from the Majors.
I think it's also worth mentioning that while there are huge amounts of evidence that several systems of esoteric number symbolism were in effect at the time of the Conver Marseilles' creation (for example, Kaballah and astrology), there's no evidence that the Majors were considered esoterically. Or even if we assume they were considered esoterically, we have no evidence that the numbers of the Majors were considered an important element of their significance, in contrast to the voluminous evidence of other systems of numerology at the time.
So, one might say that if one is going to assign meanings to the pips, it might be preferable to use systems which we know were current at the time rather than using a system based on our own interpretations of the Majors, which we can only speculate about whether such a system would have been used at that time.
As to the question of why one would want to do all this, the answer is I want to be able to read with both RWS-type decks
and classic decks, and I don't want to have to work with two totally different sets of meanings. I feel that if I did that, I might as well be working with two different oracle decks and not tarot. But that's just how I feel; I respect and sympathize with those who feel differently, and it's not my intent to argue that my approach is right and anyone else's is wrong. And who knows, I may change my mind tomorrow!
-- Lee
Edited to reduce tiresome redundancy (a bad literary habit of mine).