No, it isn't easy to have (1) without (2). The people telling you that you were wrong in those arguments are correct, and you're still mis-understanding cryptography.

Encryption without identity verification is objectively worse than no encryption at all. The reasons are straightforward:

• Encryption isn't free. Whilst performance has improved, there's no heartbleed without OpenSSL. It adds complexity, it adds a TON of extra work and operational problems like key expiry policies, and in general increases your attack surface.

• We generally feel the complexity is worth it to block MITM attacks. But if you are just handshaking with whatever is answering your packets, you aren't blocking MITM attacks.

The assumption underlying your position is (being generous) that the world is full of passive MITMs who can't also take part in the conversation, so any Diffie-Hellman key exchange will knock them out. But Snowden proved conclusively that this isn't true. Local attackers can do ARP spoofing, packet injection and other tricks and remote attackers are the NSA who also can perform large scale packet injection and active MITM attacks. Where are the passive-only attackers?

If you aren't stopping active MITM, then there don't seem to be any adversaries you are actually stopping, and at that point the additional (potentially hackable) code required and additional work required is just nothing-for-something.