I don't think we have lost the ability to engage deeply with facts so much as we have not developed the ability to engage deeply now that we have access to all of them, and everything else too.
I agree with your post, except for this last bit. I think we're saying the same thing, but we DID have the ability to engage deeply far in the past, when there was a smaller scope of knowledge required to understand policy. We now have too many facts, and too many policies and haven't needed to deal with any of it for a long time.