which you largely seem to agree on, then what was the point of any of it?

They wanted to make a statement, and the stronger the better. Unfortunately the significance of that statement was always gonna be measured in senate votes.

Overall they got 17 elected Republicans, including some very big names, to impeach in the house or convict in the senate. That's not much, but it's a bigger statement than anyone got out of the three previous presidential impeachments.

And a few more more Senators, including McConnell and Portman on the record so far, had to admit that the managers proved their case, that their not-guilty votes were only on jurisdictional grounds. In other words, if Trump were still in office, they said on the record that they would have voted to convict.

The managers got that because they were able to maximize their factual case, including this tactic at the end. Maybe today's intrigue didn't add much to the case, but because they were able to get through it quickly, it added something and didn't subtract anything. If they'd let things drag on indefinitely and become the circus that the Trump lawyers wanted to make it, public opinion would have turned and we'd have ended up with a 46-54 result.