While I understand the concern over (a) legitimizing that there's a serious debate about these things and (b) the deafness of the True Believers to anything that resembles truth, I still think it's worth tackling folks like Barton.
The battle is not for the True Believers, but for the folks on the margin, who, if they only hear claims from one side, are liable to gravitate that way, even passively. And the point is not whether we should engage in debates with a guy who's more interested in scoring ideological points than historicity, but what happens if we don't.
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The Quixotic Task of Debunking David Barton
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Thanks for posting a link to the RD piece! Thanks for the encouragement for this project.
Certainly. I actually have your book (and have a history of debunking Barton myself, though not nearly so professionally).