cause you just come off like a cocky know-it-all that really doesn't know jack shit.

See this is such a big problem on Reddit. Everyone is so fearless is hurling abuses. Does showing aggression make you feel superior?

without the merkle tree you wouldn't have the ability to aggregate transaction histories.

That's because transactions are sequential and require tracing. But that's a property of cryptocurrency, not blockchain. What if you were to store a record in the block that didn't need to depend on its predecessor - or is simply a new entity, would you still care about creating hashes that depend on its content hashes. In other words, the "transaction Id" and "block Id" need not have any correlation.

Also, I think you can simply use any other algorithm for computing block id using its transaction ids that does not require merkle trees. Naive example: take various chunks of all transaction id and concatenate them. Maybe hashing the final output so all ids are consistent. I don't see why that wouldn't work. Am I wrong?