And regarding sleeping through the night being considered an accomplishment...there's a boat load of research discussing how poor sleep hygiene / patterns in infants is associated with maternal depression, higher stress levels, child abuse, divorce, and a number of other ugly things. I wouldn't call it an accomplishment in the sense of a top SAT score or anything else you mentioned, but a crucial part of a child's integration into his or her family.
And this likely gets to the heart of the issue here. Not having your kid sleep is a deeply, deeply traumatic thing. It's one of the worst things I've ever had to go through. I've struggled with depression most of my life, but the darkest depression of my life was when my first child was waking up 10-15 times a night. I wouldn't wish that kind of torture on someone I hated. Yet I had to go through it. If you label good sleep hygiene (strange term, but I know you're not making it up) something that I as a parent ultimately should have had control over or could change, then I am a big fat failure. Not once. Not twice. Three damned times. If I could have found a way to change it, I would have. I think that's the niggling problem with it all; nobody wants to be called a failure and it's implicit in your argument (mind you, I don't think I am actually a failure, but as you have said multiple times, "the research says").
From the vantage point of the sufferers, talk about adding insult to injury! Parents with kids "with good sleep hygiene" get to sleep and they get to imply that if I tried harder my kid would too? I think we have to leave the possibility open (despite what "the research says") that maybe they have experienced something profound and maybe have come out of it with some insight. That maybe it's not just an attempt to whitewash reality and a big huge blind spot on their parts. Maybe they learned something early on about control and how little we actually have.
Yes – this is like the whole “everyone can breastfeed if they try hard enough" argument – it just adds insult to injury. The fact is, if a little luck wasn't involved and nursing was all about effort, I would be like a dairy farm feeding all the hungry babies of the world! Alas, it certainly didn't turn out that way. I lucked out though with the sleep - easy going, good sleeper, and we were able to springboard off this by not overstimulating her at night and sabotaging a good thing.
I've started to view parenting like driving a car:
The amount of time and dedication you put into something, like nursing or sleep care, is like the gasoline you put in a tank. The more you put in, and the better quality, the farther your car will go.
But luck/genetics/fate/other uncontrollable circumstance is like the ignition – you need a little spark to get the whole thing rolling. It doesn’t matter if you have a full tank of premium gas, if you don’t have the ignition, you aren’t going anywhere. It has nothing to do with what’s in your tank or how badly you want that car to start moving.
A bit of luck + time and dedication + love = parenting success!