Barleywine
I actually find the PKT a highly annoying read. Published almost ten years after the secrets of the GD were revealed, it is strangely anachronistic, hinting at things that would already have been common knowledge to anyone with half an interest in them. The things he so famously hints at can easily be derived from other sources, while he refrains from discussing what is really important, the things unique to this deck and his own worldview. All of the GD stuff is a piece of cake compared to that, and he hardly mentioned it.
I always thought so too, and in many ways I still do - or at least I find it wanting in useful detail compared to the work of people like Crowley, Paul Foster Case, Robert Wang, and many others. But I decided to read it again after more than 40 years to see if anything's changed, and my thought now is "What was the big deal?" It just seems a bit tepid and skeletal now, and certainly isn't offensive enough to get me worked up, it's just mainly irksome and not really a wonderful source of illumination for the deck (reading the divination material, the words "hodge-podge" and "mish-mash" keep interrupting my train of thought). The deck kind of has to stand on its own, which it does admirably. (But, of course, for my purposes I don't see it EVER replacing the Thoth.)
By the way, although this is an interesting discussion, nobody has answered my original question about the Manual of Cartomancy. Perhaps nodody has made the effort to seek it out? The two sections on divination with the tarot certainly won't alter anyone's perspective if they've already read th PKT, I was just curious whether going after admittedly "damaged goods" is worth the effort.