That "massively deep philosophy/corpus" doesn't help things, though. With nearly 200 years of a leadership that teaches that whatever is spoken by God's servants (the highest church leadership) is to be equated as similar to the word of God (with a normal human distribution of those leaders who approach this view with a cautious humility through those who speak their musings with confidence) there's a HUGE of collection of some pretty odd beliefs. Since the church leadership almost never repudiates these past statements, preferring to have them quietly fade from the collective memory and consciousness of the membership over time, chances are that there's still some few members who are aware of these weird beliefs and can back them up with some sort of statement by a modern LDS prophet or apostle. This makes any "actual truth value" of an odd teaching or belief really difficult to gauge, and chances are there's some actual statement behind many of that unreliable information.

That's speaking of teachings and doctrine, of course. When it comes to history that's less like trying to nail Jell-o to the wall and it's much easier to find sources for more accurate history, and I agree that it's a bit sad how little accuracy in history seems to be respected by some believing and formerly-believing members.