I don't think we have to find the same things poetic

I think you're railing less against poetry and more against the prevailing culture of how we teach art. I don't disagree with you either, that what academics see as "good" versus what is often actually good (or perceived as good by modern taste) can be quite different, or that academics can be unnecessarily exclusive. Spoiler alert, they are, because most academics can't survive without an air of exclusivity. Universities can be gross about exclusivity and I say this as someone who's got two degrees and is heading back for another diploma.

poetry is a vestigial remnant of an era of illiteracy where the majority of the public was incapable of creating or consuming the written word, so words written with particular artistry were elevated to a new art form through their sheer rarity

This is actually a decent explanation of the beginning of written poetry. I totally agree. We went on to do other things with poetry after this, but this is exactly where it came from.

Or even to go further, Poetry came from when we used rhythm and rhyming to remember long stories, such as the Sagas, or Beowulf, or the works of Homer, or the Epic of Gilgamesh. But how did we decide what was good enough to write down? the words that were written with, as you say " particular artistry". It's not like Beowulf was the only story being told, but it was one of the ones that someone thought was good enough to write down, and the one that someone thought was good enough to save from a fire, and the one that people thought was good enough to keep preserved for almost 1000 years.