You admit it yourself, the terms of the Treaty didn't matter. The Treaty did not really matter, the Treaty was just an emblem of their loss.

What mattered was the resentment of losing a war they thought they should have won, sharing a national delusion that it was the fault of anything but gleefully fighting a war against most of the neighbors, and the only way to prevent that would have been to eradicate them as a nation, as some French and British leaders wished, but America refused and counselled against.