I have to say, that understanding modes made a lot more sense to me once I started seeing them in terms of the intervals between the notes. I never found the conventional way of using the C natural scale (for Ionian) as a starting point very helpful; it wrongly suggests to learners that Dorian must always start on the d note, etc. If you start exploring Greek and East European scales, then the intervals are everything to me, but I don’t see why you guys need to get so angry about it all. What works for some people doesn’t necessarily work for others.