"the less being that with the naked eye you can't see much more than a few hundred thousand years into the past"
Actually you can see about 2 million years into the past as I have done a number of times -- Andromeda.
However, that doesn't invalidate your argument. In fact, you can't just "look up" and see the universe for what it is. It takes a lot more than that. That's why our present understanding of it's majesty is not a lot more than a century old.