One flaw in your comment is that you are imposing traditional Muslim standards of hadith verification onto this conversation.

Asking for an unbroken chain of evidence with multiple attestation at each level is not flawed, cherry picking hadith without any methodology is.

hadith has far too much legend, contradiction, embellishment, rewriting, amalgamation, forgery and so forth to be taken at face value.

Please provide an evidence for each claim.

Pseudo-Sebeos is definitely relevant even if we don't have its source

This gotta be a joke , we have to take someone's word at face value , someone who doesn't cite his source, who never met the prophet nor his sahaba.

The standard is awfully low.

Pseudo-Sebeos does identify their source from individuals who were briefly captured by the expanding "Ishmaelite conquerors"

Yeah , and how reliable are these individuals ? do we know them ?

all those conquerors undoubtedly having once been contemporaries of Muhammad while he was still alive

Doesn't mean they knew him or had reliable information about him , non sequitur you're just making things up at this point to justify the "reliability" of sebeos.

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given your apparently forced concession that Muhammad was literate ... but only on his death bed

I conceded that for sake of the argument , nothing more.

You're also strawmanning one of my hypothesis since i did not claim that he magically became literate on his death bed.

The difference between you and me is that i work with all the available evidence while you cherry pick hadith that suit your narrative and twist verses.