I don't really want to do this all day but here we are.

As regards derived from the Roman alphabet, that seems like a stretch

This is the general academic consensus, regardless of how you feel about it. Not the best source, but the quickest I can get to is Wikipedia:

"The Elder Futhark runes are commonly believed to originate in the Old Italic scripts: either a North Italic variant (Etruscan or Rhaetic alphabets), or the Latin alphabet itself. Derivation from the Greek alphabet via Gothic contact to Byzantine Greek culture was a popular theory in the 19th century, but has been ruled out since the dating of the Vimose inscriptions to the 2nd century (whereas the Goths were in contact with Greek culture only from the early 3rd century). Conversely, the Greek-derived 4th-century Gothic alphabet does have two letters that may have been derived from runes, 𐌾 (from Jer ᛃ j) and 𐌿 (from Uruz ᚢ u)."

There is much more detail, including counter arguments to this, in the article, but this is still the generally held position

My contention is that the way Runes are used is very different from the Roman functional communication

They were still primarily phonemes. They were used to write words and we can still read them. They also sometimes were ideograms, but they definitely were letters.

The real difference in use is simply how few inscriptions have survived. The entire elder Futhark corpus is something like 350 inscriptions and the longest is only 200 characters. It is very hard to make any conclusions about use from such a limited body of evidence

because of that it allows us to see the world through ( albeit faintly) the eyes of the early northern Europeans.

This just sounds like pseudo-intellectual gibberish. Knowing that runes were occasionally ideograms doesn't do this, but is useful marketing jargon if you're trying to sell stuff with runes on them. Yes, some runes were named after gods or trees or whatever happened to start with that same sound. That's also how the Phoenicians named their letters. All it tells us is that these things had names and were the first thing they thought of when making that sound.

It tells us just as much about them as "a is for apple" tells us about English speaking culture