> It saddens me greatly if it's all been whitewashed down to "Dark Ages wrongspeak, Early Middle Ages rightspeak" and "Middle Ages backwards, Renaissance forwards" today because that is so grossly worthless.

It always is alarming how often you see people say "smart people don't say X anymore, smart people say Y now," and a large segment of people jumps on board without any critical thought. It's not that criticism of the term is entirely without merit, but such criticism could be applied to all simplistic labels for historical epochs. Yet you don't see people take such issue with terms like "Bronze Age Collapse," because these comments aren't coming from a consistent intellectual framework, but rather from people mindlessly repeating a shibboleth.