Maybe you missed when I said 'naked eye'. I saw, with my naked eye, stars wedged in between stars. When I looked at the milky way, I saw, indeed, a 'white haze'. But the edge of that white haze was made up of more stars. I could deduce, then, that perhaps the stars there were simply so close in that haze that I could not differentiate them with my naked eye.
That's not a scientific observation, because you cannot see the individual stars, unaided. The point is, Ptolemy and Hipparchus, the best of the day, did not believe what you assert to be true because they had no evidence for it. You KNOW it to be true, so don't tell me you imagined it.