FPTP isn't a problem. It is a godsend. If we had proportional representation we'd be still stuck in Brexit limbo forever. Many countries in Europe went PR and it ruined them. They couldn't get anything done. You just end up with coalitions and eventually a broken system.
PR has worked fine in Germany. Democracy should surely about "the people"s views being represented. So in one of the recent elections UKIP got 12% of the vote. 1 in 8 people voted for them and they got 1 in 650 MPs. That tells me it's not a great system. It might have produced strong governments but that's not the same as them being effective or good.
To respond to your other points...I'm going to concede the Boaty McBoatface one, it was a bad example.
The wisdom of crowds thing is something I've heard of but having looked into it two of the criteria for it to apply are:
"For crowds to be wise, they must be characterized by a diversity of opinion and each person's opinion should be independent of those around him or her."I'd agree the first of those applies to an electorate, the first of those certainly does not. We are all influenced by each other, by the media, now by social media, and by the campaigns of both sides. So yeah, guessing the weight of a cow (an example given as demonstrating this effect) might give you a better result if you ask a lot of people. And that kinda makes sense, some will overestimate, others will underestimate. But as soon as they start discussing the matter and start influencing each other or see a load of headlines about how the EU is making cows fatter then it's going to affect the result.
People aren't idiots because they disagree with me, they're idiots simply because they are. You surely aren't arguing that the electorate are, on average, well educated and understand all the implications of us being an EU member or not being. You said it yourself, it was more of a feeling. Boris is popular because he's funny and likeable, whether a lot of the things he says are true doesn't seem to matter to people. People increasingly don't seem to care what is true.
Sovereignty is generally not something one gives up, it's something which is taken from you, often as the result of a war. Like how we took India's sovereignty and a bunch of other country's when we built our Empire, countries who now celebrate their independence from us since we gave it back or they took it back.
We chose to join the EU, we can choose to leave -
because we are sovereign.
And even within the EU we didn't agree to everything, we opted out of being part of the Shengen agreement, for example.
We did sign up to freedom of movement, but the Daily Mail's myth of these immigrants "coming over here" and being given a free house and living it up on benefits are bollox. There are rules on what they can claim and EU rules allow us to deport citizens from other EU countries if they have become a burden on the welfare system. Immigration has been a good thing for us economically and in terms of filling skills gaps. Old people don't like it because of "all them foreigners coming over here", but as you say, that's just a feeling, it's not because of any facts.