Yah, I get it's all complicated. Actually it was exactly one guy saying hey what about this. By completely ignoring the contemporaneous linguistics recorded by the Spanish priest, academics hamstrung themselves for centuries in understanding a native American culture and essentially they gave up. Kudos to Knorozov for ignoring the conventional wisdom and starting from that base, which had been previously dismissed. And subsequently his work generated interest in working on the language again.

And ignores the Spanish priest who wrote down the syllables in the first place.

Wow - so a 16th century Spanish priest literally wrote out the Mayan alphabet with drawings of the syllabic glyphs aided by Mayan scribes and translated them Latin alphabetic characters but modern academics decided to ignore that in favor of the idea that the writing was indecipherable. Well it would be if you ignore the 'rosetta stone' book. Russian scholar looks at book and uses it to decipher the writing. Genius!