"Families" of manuscripts? Or is one "family" really a gang of criminals?

As I was doing the post on the MacArthur discussion of the Bible versions it began to dawn on me for the first time that the very idea of "families" of manuscripts is suspect. They said:

5. Far more manuscripts are in existence today for the New Testament than for any other piece of ancient literature. There are at least four Scripture manuscript families that are widely recognized. They include the Alexandrian Text, the Western Text, the Caesarean Text, and the Byzantine, or Majority, Text.

And I was able to answer off the top of my head:

This list may itself be misleading, as all are listed as if they were choices on a salad bar, but the Alexandrians are represented by very few manuscripts and are the ones called "older and better" that are really corrupted; as Burgon points out, the "Western text" is a complete invention by Westcott and Hort; the term "Majority text" is generally rejected by supporters of the King James Bible -- "Traditional Text" says it better, or even "Byzantine"; and as for the "Caesarean text," it looks like another fictional category:

And followed up with this comment from The Bible Researcher:

In recent years many scholars have expressed doubts about the existence of a "Caesarean text..." More recently, Kurt Aland has expressed an even more skeptical opinion. He acknowledges only the Alexandrian and Byzantine text-types. While the "theoretical possibility" of a Caesarean text-type "must be conceded," Aland says that it is "purely hypothetical."

But of course, the whole thing is made up! There were no "families" until Westcott and Hort. They invented the Western "family" and of course the "Alexandrian" in the first place - to give legitimacy to the Alexandrians. To create the illusion that there are simply a number of equally valid lines of manuscripts. Of course the more the better for that purpose.

So along comes Kurt Aland and blows the whistle on two of the most obviously fictitious, the "Western" and the "Caesarean," leaving the "Alexandrian" alongside the "Byzantine" (a term preferred by the KJV side of the argument to "Majority Text," or maybe "Traditional Text" is the best term for it)

But the "family" of "Alexandrians" is not a family at all, it's a gang of criminals!

The whole idea of separate families is created by the fact that they are different from each other, by the many variants between them. If the variants in one of the "families" can be shown to be due to corruptions of various kinds, then it should not be called a "family" at all.