The illuminating + obscuring = ?

Heedless of his points, I thought Ramus' style was the main focus of this text.
I did truly think he made several very worthwhile connections and attacks, such as his defense of immoral individuals as potentially valid and accomplished rhetors (lower half of second column on page 685). This was spot on in my eyes, a note I had actually made to myself in reading Quintillian that he managed to express much more thoroughly than I ever would have thought to. But he also had a lot of watery ones, such as his first denouncement of Quintillian’s five-part classification through the logic that things such as ‘moral philosophy’ must either fit structurally into one of these parts or occupy an entirely separate one, as opposed to accepting that a philosophy is…well, a philosophy—and not a piece of a framework.
In both cases, his inflammatory style fills the entire work with a sort of blinding flare, like the sun catching an angled windowpane to fill it with light, and obscure everything behind. It some cases it serves him well, such as in the cases where his arguments line up with your own thoughts and therefore make you want to pump your fist alongside him into Quintillian’s kidneys. This is along the lines of what I believe Sadie was hinting at, with his ethos inflating to eclipse his perhaps lackluster social standing.
But is also often fails, as when you flip back to ‘Quintillian’s Actual Writing’ and realize there’s actually not much behind Ramus’ glare at all. In these cases, as Mitch suggested, Ramus’ lack of exploration and defense of Quintillian rather makes you lose your stomach for the whole affair, like a street fight between a braggart and someone who never even wanted to step into the ring at all.

Ramus seems to ride the highs very high, trusting that they will balance out the inevitable plummets enough to carry the reader high enough so that he or she is still on board with him at the end.