So, I read those, and none of that even remotely convinces me that humans didn't discover a mutation of that plant as something resembling maize in the wild, find that it was good to eat, and then start cultivating it.

It doesn't seem so "well established" on Wikipedia, either (not the most reliable source, obviously), since they list several competing theories. I'm not arguing that corn hasn't been artificially selected for thousands of years, it seemingly obviously has. I'm arguing that there is no way they started with something that wasn't meaningfully edible, and then just decided that they could make it edible if they only planted it repeatedly and in different ways.