I think you've done a good job explaining some of the key ideas behind Critical Theory--I haven't actually read Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Horkheimer, 1972), because it's rather expensive to buy compared to other Critical Theory works, but I've read various other works including the essay Traditional and Critical Theory and Eclipse of Reason.

Unfortunately, I think you--in good company, I admit, since neither the Frankfurt School philosophers nor many of their aficionados thereafter have picked up on this--don't highlight what an awful hatchet-job Critical Theory does to the epistemology of the scientific method. Horkheimer goes to some pains to make sure the Critical Theory cannot itself be evaluated and judged on merit, and that people involved are as strongly biased and non-objective as possible by threatening you with irrelevance and being a mere cog in an oppressive machine if you and your theories do not form a dynamic unity with the oppressed.

If you read through his predictions about what the more traditional Enlightenment-based society could not do--I think this was in Eclipse of Reason, but I forget?--you find that he was wrong on almost every count. Enlightenment-based society delivered--not on everything, but on a lot, and far better than one would expect we could have done had we followed the vague guidance from Critical Theory.

I thus view Critical Theory as a field as useful in the same way that cisplatin is a good drug: it's deadly poison to your body, but it is even worse deadly poison to cancer, so taken with care in just the right circumstances, it makes things better rather than worse.

For everything else, it's far worse than nothing.

We do, as a society, have some pretty serious cancers. So, if we can't discern a highly-specific treatment for the cancer (and societies are complicated so it's often difficult), fine, we can take a liiittle bit of Critical Theory.

Right now, though, our problem is that far too much has filtered into popular culture, and it is part of what is poisoning us.

I would recommend that people get to know the basics of Critical Theory. But keep it locked up in the medicine cabinet, out of reach of children, use only as directed, and contact your doctor immediately if you develop culture wars, loss of belief in objective truth, inability to use evidence to shape your ideas, or obsession with interpreting everything no matter how innocuous as a pattern of oppression.