I've got to say, I think you are being overly dismissive of the sage advice of a number of people who have a great deal of experience riding long distance. When I read your ride report, what I see is "one crash at 25mph in a 100-mile ride, and several near misses". You screwed up, but you got lucky, and it wasn't a ride-ending crash, and you didn't take out any other riders. Other people screwed up around you, but luckily their screwups were small enough that you didn't get taken out. Next time, you may not be so lucky. One of the riders on one of our brevets last summer had just finished recuperating from a year off the bike, recovering from a broken back that she got riding in a paceline and hitting a pothole that hadn't been called out (she flew off her bike and broke her back when she hit the ground).

Long-distance bicycle riding is an inherently risky activity, there's no way around it. But personally, I prefer to enjoy the ride and avoid riding in pacelines where you have to be focussed solely on the paceline, and even with absolute focus on the paceline, you are still at much greater risk than riding just a little slower but with fewer riders around. So far, I've had no crashes in about 25000 miles of long distance riding, knock on wood.