I just want to take up your point about Copernicus.  It's just as well that you don't want to compare yourself with him: his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was published in the year of his death.  Copernicus did not live to experience the reception of his work in the way you suggest.  He's a bad example for your arguments for other reasons too, since successors like Brahe accepted his mathematics without accepting his physical model of the solar system.  This is valid, incidentally: the mathematics of Ptolemy works rather well as a predictive model for planetary and celestial predictions.