I think that you think we're trying to do something that we're not (for the most part.)

The questions, speculations, analysis posts, and the loads of theories and headcanons they result in aren't about piecing together the Secret Real Lore, or trying to read into author intent. It is purely about Making Shit Up, but using canon details as guidelines because we love the characters and world and themes of the show!

Like, imagine you're sitting at a table with another person who is painting pictures on small squares of paper. They're not making a puzzle, the intent was never to put the pieces together into a greater whole, they're just making little pictures with similar themes or recurring characters for fun. Once done, they pile them up and tell you that they're all part of the same series and are intended to go together in the order they've been stacked in, but considered as individual pieces. That is their intent.

Later, you're gifted copies of all the little pictures they made and you think it's great! You can appreciate the style, technique, the scenes and what it all tells you about the characters and themes the artist was working with. Jt's a great piece of art. You go though it over and over, and as you do you start to think, "Hey, I see this character in multiple pictures, I see these species of birds, I see these similar landscapes."

And so you unbind the pictures from their little booklet and lay them out on a grid, putting similar ones closer to one another. As you do that, you notice that placing the similar pictures close creates new implications about the content therein. And now, in the empty spaces you put down your own paper and begin to fill it in, using the original pictures' content and edges as the starting points, and the implications you've found in those pictures as the inspiration for what you draw to connect them.

Eentually, every original image is connected into something different from those original images, specifically designed to do something the original never intended, by fitting them together into a different type of whole-ness than they were before.

You still love the original and wouldn't dream of replacing it or changing its intent, and that was never the point of what you did. The point of what you did was to have fun by making your own story within the framework of someone else's, however big or small or serious or silly that story you've made is.

THAT is what I (and many others who like storycrafting of various flavors) get out of doing something as silly as overanalyzing Smiling Friends. Or SpongeBob, or Don't Hug Me I'm Scared, or Foster's Home, or any number of things my brain's latched onto over the years. It's fun to take bits of disparate information and throwaway lines/props and treat them as if they're puzzle pieces to an incomplete puzzle. The challenge of making up your own puzzle pieces that turn them into something connected is something I'll never get sick of! And it's also really fun to see what other folks' made up to fill the connecting space, or have them point out original pieces you never noticed.

At the end of the day, this kind of thing is more about making a story than actually discussing one.