"Cause and Effect" makes no sense (*Spoilers*)

As much as I like this episode in some ways (Mandela Effect-type episodes are always balm to the wounds), it does provoke quite a massive amount of questions, not to mention what a boring name for a space-fantasy adventure show episode from the eighties..

So, the story goes, The Enterprise somehow 'spends 17 days' in a time-loop (?? How is this even possible? If it's a TIME-LOOP, the time resets every time, and there is no 'time spent', especially since no one's existence is continuous, but is disrupted by the explosion and then reset!), but this other ship spends 80 years, because they are so stooopeeeeed or something.

Huh?

If the other ship has been in the time-loop..

(and what kind of LOOP is it, if time goes forward anyway so much that entire generations have advanced for The Enterprise? So these people DO go forward in time for 80 years normally, despite the 'loop'? So now it's not even a TIME-loop, they just keep resetting, but somehow repeating and and..??!!)

..for 80 years. WHAT did they collide with, and why did they explode for 80 years, a long, long time before Picard's crew even arrived?

Now, they didn't collide with Starship Enterprise, but what prevents them from colliding with what they did for 80 years before Enterprise was even there?

Seriously, Picard's ship and crew did NOT solve the other ship's 80-year-long problem!

There are so many weird things and logical fallacies about this episode, it makes your head spin. How can time go forward, when the events keep repeating, and why are they calling it a time-loop, when clearly time just goes forward normally anyway? What kind of loop is it, if not time-loop?

The 'older ship' should've been in a steady time-loop that resets 'somewhen' 80 years ago every time, Enterprise should've been in its own time-loop that resets 'somewhen' 17 days ago.

How can these completely differently-timed loops meet, and why would they loop for 80 years until meeting Enterprise, then keep looping?

If Enterprise crew can figure out everything in 17 days, why can't the other crew figure it out in 80 years? HOW stoopeeed are these people? Aren't all crews relatively equal from the Federation's point of view? Did they somehow recruit/create a MIRACLE-CREW that far surpasses every other crew in the whole Federation?! (What kind of sense would this even make?)

Just because 'we like them' or they are charming to the audience, doesn't mean this crew would or even could be _THIS_ much more intelligent than your regular, standard crew, not friggin' 80 years more intelligent! How long would it have taken for them to figure out, if 80 years wasn't even enough?

How do you go to future by experiencing a time-loop for 80 years?

This kind of 'how long did it take' is a kitchen-philosophical question more fit to the 'Groundhog Day' concept, but not an actual time-loop! If they keep EXPLODING every time, they themselves RESET every time, and thus are not the same people every time, right? The diagram that shows them 'returning' to the origin point also makes no sense - how can tiny fragments return back after such an explosion, to make a 'whole' again? No, nothing 'returns', time supposedly just resets or 'loops' so the explosion hasn't happened yet.

Nothing about this episode makes almost any sense, especially the fact that Captain Frasier had actually somehow traveled 80 years forward even though they were in a time-loop - - you can't have it both ways! Either they were in a time-loop and never traveled into the future, or they were in some OTHER kind of thing that still made them somehow travel, even though they didn't feel the time (??) or age at all... like, how do you travel in normal time 80 years without aging just because you keep dying and don't experience it at all, and..

As said, I like this kind of episode, but the explanations at the end always ruin the mystery and make everything nonsensical, because the writers can't truly think fourth-dimensionally..