Philosophy has spent 3000 years trying to organize humans well and has apparently failed to solve that problem.

Reframing that reality as "actually it doesn't matter what the consequence is as long as we followed our values to the letter!" is convenient, but in modern terminology, a cope.

I read your links and was already aware of deontology anyway but it was a nice refresher. Yup, you're right, we're describing what we care about! And in doing so we represent the majority of human thinking - maybe not the human thinking that gets written down, but nonetheless.

Why should people care to convince dusty academics what is right and wrong using logical systems and proofs when the dusty academic has lost the ethical debate immediately in the eyes of most when he admits that according to his ethical system, lying to prevent Anne Frank is wrong? This is instinctively wrong to most people, so, why should we care? Rigid logic is worthless when people are looking for something else, and rigid logic alone isn't enough to build a society.

I feel like you got to deontology and stopped. I've never actually met someone who studies ethics who got to deontology and didn't later end up with emergency exit modes, such as the Anne frank scenario. Using ethics to live a virtuous life is well and good, but Nazis don't do that, and you won't convince them using deontology to not round people up. You don't have to go all the way the other way and make "ends justify the means" arguments. Just allow yourself the flexibility to say "in an emergency, of course it's ok to lie," which may not seem logically sound, but society isn't logically nor is it possible to make it purely logical enough to be a valid ground for Kantian ethics to result in actual virtuous people - because the man that gives up Anne Frank telling the truth is not virtuous, he is a selfish monster, sacrificing a human life for his own sense of virtue and preservation of ethical purity, a disgusting trade off.