Sorry, I didn't mean to come across as judging you. It's just that ocean-moonshine only recently started making any sense to me, and I figured you might be in the same boat as me.

As for why the instincts are important, that's a wholly different question. The whole reason they're known as "subtypes" is because they interact very intimately with your etype to the extent that a self-pres Nine is going to have very different issues to a sexual Nine, for instance. Or, more broadly, if you have a casual interest in the Enneagram, they're certainly apparent in real life enough to make them worth looking into. I can understand the mindset of discarding things that don't seem to make sense or have much of a point.