I'm glad you laid it out like this. Very good explanation.
In my observations of people here, and irl, I have noticed that with healthy people, and most I am referring to are <40, with most <30, it seems that the tertiary is oriented opposite the dominant. This is in EPs, IPs, IJs thus far. As people get older, they seem to use both attitudes with greater ability, so it muddies things a bit. And <20 is difficult because it's controversial, but generally accepted, that the tert hasn't developed yet.
Please cite examples. Here is one for my side: Look at INTJs vs. INTPs and the way they deal with feelings. INTJs are notably threatened when people attempt to pry for more private information than they want to give away. They are very cognizant of the strategic value of withholding information and they almost always consider their feelings extremely private information.
They make a point of giving away as little information as necessary, because they recognize the negative implications of letting people know too much about their feelings and motivations. A hallmark of Fe is emotional openness--sharing feelings and expecting the same in kind, because that is how loyalty to friends and family is expressed.
If you can get an INTJ to even talk about this, you'll find that they sincerely dislike being prodded to reveal their feelings. They care far less about what others think of them than do INTPs--which wouldn't make sense according to your theory, because INTJs and INTPs would have the same Feeling function and it would be an even lower priority for INTPs. And yet INTPs are clearly more concerned with how they are perceived and far more desiring of the approval of others. How can this be if INTJs have Fe in higher priority?
When I try to use Fe to relate to an INTJ, I almost invariably get a bad reaction because when Fe shares feelings, it expects a similar response from others--but this comes off to INTJs as a direct attempt to manipulate them into revealing more of their private feelings than they want to. If you try to force this, they will shut you out.
NTPs make a point of making themselves understood--they will restate, rehash and repeat themselves and go to every effort to rephrase their ideas in ways that make sense to others because they desperately want their ideas to be understood (Ne), appreciated and validated (Fe) by others.
You'll notice that INTJs really don't care about this. Not only do they not care if you understand their feelings, they don't
want you to understand their feelings in the first place because that's private, sensitive information that could potentially be leveraged against them. This kind of borderline paranoid protection of/refusal to express feelings openly is clearly indicative of Fi and absolutely not Fe. (Conversely, the NTP's need for personal/emotional validation from others, itself a clear result of Fe, is visibly absent in INTJs.)
Since my observations don't match accepted theories, I necessarily have begun questioning the theories.
Once you focus on the tert and its attitude in theory, you realize just how much people take the whole idea of the tert being aligned with the dominant for granted, and use it to describe all kinds of reasons for how they are. It is such a common practice on here to lump the aux and the tert function together in some sort of symbiotic relationship. Jung never intended for two rational or two irrational functions to work in cohort, in fact, he said emphatically that they can't work together. Yet people verbalize all the time on here that, "My FeTi drives me to do this, or drives me to do that." Furthermore, who decided that Jung meant the tert was aligned with the dominant function, although he never specified that, and there are one or two places where he specified the opposite? So, if you are being true to a "Jungian Framework" you would at the least remain open regarding the tert's orientation, wouldn't you? Where do you decide when to follow Jung, and later when to follow another "expert?"
If your claim about the dom/tert opposite theory were so clearly obvious from Jung's text, there would not be such significant support for the opposing theory. Once again, Jung is ambiguous on this subject, as he was much more concerned with defining each function on its own than spending time talking about the function hierarchy within an individual.
You have not established that Jung believed the dominant and tertiary to be in opposite directions. His text is sometimes vague and difficult to interpret. Please quote precisely where Jung states definitively that the dom and tert are in opposite directions. If he had been as clear about this as you claim, there simply would not be significant controversy among Jungian scholars about it.
As of now, it is uncertain what Jung really meant to say on this topic, and it's unlikely we'll ever know for sure. (I just got the "Red Book" for my birthday though, so I'll let you know if I find anything about it...although thus far it seems mostly about his musings on theology and not very typology-related.)
Also please quote where he says that two Judging or two Perceiving functions cannot work together. IIRC he says that all four functions influence us all the time and often in ways that are totally unconscious to us. (As for shadows, he doesn't really say much about them other than if they are used at all, it would require especially great expenditure of energy, which is my primary basis for claiming that they are not used often.)
Often I've found that certain excerpts seem to mean one thing but then mean something else when viewed in the context of the chapter he's writing or the broader subject he's discussing. Since his work has been translated from German it's not always clear exactly what he meant to say.
Finally, from a logical perspective, it could make total sense that the aux and tert are both opposite the dominant because the dominant is so strong. What doesn't make much sense, when you think about it, is how an aux function alone can balance a strong dominant function, and a weaker tert function. There's too much attitude one way; it would pull a person out of balance over time, which is what I argued about with Ayn Rand. Yet it DOES quantitatively make sense that two weaker functions could balance a very strong function, providing for more balance.
People
are out of balance over time--most of the time, in fact. That's why everyone is either an introvert or an extrovert--no one is perfectly balanced between the two. The aux function alone
doesn't completely balance the dominant, and there's no reason to suppose that it should. If it did, people would be completely balanced on the E/I axis, and no one is.
The reason the auxiliary is key to developing some measure of balance is its opposition to the dominant in terms of direction and rationality/irrationality. Your argument that the aux+tert must be oriented the same way in order to "balance out" the dom's overwhelming influence seems predicated on the erroneous assumption that people's personalities are assumed to be balanced between introversion and extroversion in the first place. They're not; that's why we have introverts and extroverts.
On the other hand, observation of very unbalanced personalities makes it clear what is happening when someone ignores the auxiliary in favor of the dom+tert loop. The reason this doesn't work well is that the dom and tert are oriented the same way, and the reason people are tempted into using it is that the tert is sometimes more comfortable due to its common orientation with the dominant.
This leads us to another problem with your theory--if the tert were in the same direction as the aux, it would be an equally viable option for balancing the dominant. Suddenly an ESFJ would be able to use either Fe+Si
or Fe+Ni and neither would produce the structural imbalance characteristic of personalities stuck in the dom+tert loop. (In practice, unbalanced ESFJs are almost always stuck in some sort of Fe+Ne loop and become far too dependent upon what others think of them.)
People using primarily dom+tert are invariably too introverted (too dependent upon internal/subjective validation, as a result of using two introverted functions) or too extroverted (too dependent upon external/objective validation from others, as a result of using two extroverted functions.) These clearly observable imbalances would not happen if the tert were the same direction as the aux because dom+tert would work just as effectively as dom+aux--and yet in practice, it doesn't.
I totally believe other things are going on as well. I think the dominant's opposite attitude is preened early on (early teens? late teens?) to assume a strong helper role to the dominant, and it follows that the aux's opposite attitude would do the same thing, but later. So, it's not just functions-in-a-box, but layers of things going on. Having said that, I still think the main thing going on with the first 3 makes most sense with the formula: Strong I = weak e + weak e, and so forth.
I haven't really gotten to the inferior function yet.
That doesn't really hold up. Your reasoning assumes that strong I + weak E + weak E is necessary for balance, but where do you get the assumption that this balance is supposed to exist in the first place? As I said earlier, people's personalities
are inherently unbalanced.
The need to have the aux+tert oriented the same way in order to "balance out" the direction of the dominant is purely imagined. Everyone is unbalanced toward the influence of his dominant function, and thus, everyone is an introvert or an extrovert. This hypothetical perfect balance between strong I and weak E + weak E (presumably you mean the two weak Es would be equal in strength to the one strong I) would result in no real preference for introversion or extroversion, which never exists in practice--even among very well developed people.