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I wouldn't undersell philosophy as a discipline. In some ways, it is the ultimate discipline. Social science is just applied Biology which is just applied Chemistry... Physics... Math... Philosophy. When you start examining the ultimate questions it gets quite philosophical.
But here's the thing. As a discipline so untethered by constraints, it's difficult to be "good" at philosophy. Breadth matters more than depth. And, when it comes to breadth, someone like Scott, Cremieux, or even a top 4chan autist is going to have far more of it than a philosophy professor at Oxford. The modern information network has created polymath monsters of the sort which Thomas Jefferson could never imagine.
This surprises me entirely. Academia is so stilted that it rarely produces novel thought at all. Who are these radical new idea-smiths, sharpened by years of formal training?
It... depends on what you mean by that. In some sense, yeah, philosophy is more radically free of constraints than any other discipline, in the sense that any foundational premise or assumption is always fair game for critique. If you're a physicist and you think Einstein was wrong, you're a crank. If you're a mathematician and you want to be an ultrafinitist then at best you're engaged in a non-standard project that has little relevance to the work of mainstream professional mathematicians (and at worst you're a crank). But in philosophy, if you want to argue that philosophy itself is dumb and not worth doing and is incapable of generating truth or knowledge (as, arguably, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein held at times), then you're not a crank. You're just doing philosophy, and philosophers will praise you as an insightful and original thinker if you're capable of supporting your position.
But in another sense, it's just as constrained as any other discipline. With few exceptions, the vast majority of Western philosophers past and present have taken themselves to be addressing questions that had correct and incorrect answers, and their goal was to arrive at correct answers and support their positions with arguments and evidence (yes, even the "postmodernists" - the "relativism" of Foucault and Derrida was greatly exaggerated through misreadings of their work).
My use of the word "breadth" may have been misleading there. I meant "breadth" insofar as you can bring a wide range of relevant knowledge and references to bear on a specific question or problem you're addressing. Not in the sense of, you can give me hot takes on a lot of different topics that may or may not be related to your specialty.
To give a concrete example, the work of Ted Sider and Trenton Merricks addresses, in far more meticulous and thorough detail, the problems that Scott outlined in The Categories Were Made For Man.
"Polymaths" almost always grossly overestimate their competence.
I linked the work of François Kammerer regarding illusionism about consciousness elsewhere in the thread. It's not uncommon for people in internet debates to express skepticism about the hard problem of consciousness, but they tend to be unfamiliar with the existing academic work on the problem, and frankly they usually don't understand what the problem is even about in the first place. Contemporary defenders of illusionism both understand the problem, and they appreciate the severe uphill challenge that illusionism faces, but they still defend the position, which is interesting if nothing else.
Todd McGowan's work on reinterpreting Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of his Zizekian reading of Hegel (part 1 of a brief overview and part 2) made Lacan's work a lot more interesting and accessible than Lacan himself did, and it had a significant and enduring impact on the way I interpret my own actions and the actions of other people.
Chris Cutrone managed to convince me that the Marxist tradition was more intellectually interesting than I previously assumed.
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