"But all they have, and see with their own eyes to have, are numbers next to their addresses"
When you wrote this for some reason I thought you were referring to UTXO's when you wrote "addresses", and that you had taken a deeper dive into bitcoin than I thought. I wonder why my brain translated things this way. Maybe because you took the time to write so many words, I must have figured surely this person had taken a deep deep deep dive to write so much. Oh well, my bad.
Like I already said, I don't care about the system through which people access the redistribution scheme. I'm just describing the latter. I don't have to dive into anything to know that when I give someone my money and get number written next to my address I just participated in an instance of asset redistribution, and not in a market transaction.