You’re making a subtle but important distinction here. Catholics don’t dispute the authority or value of the Bible; their argument is really about interpretive authority. The Church positions itself as a guide for understanding the text as a coherent whole, rather than letting individual readers declare doctrine based on isolated passages. Your comparison to study bias is spot-on—approaching the Bible with a conclusion in mind tends to produce cherry-picked proofs rather than a faithful understanding of the text’s broader narrative.
What’s striking is that the Catholic method assumes humans are limited in their ability to perceive the full theological picture without guidance, whereas Protestantism leans on personal discernment, which can easily reflect personal biases. In a way, the Catholic approach is more consistent intellectually, even if the claim of Apostolic Succession does rest on a fragile historical chain.
The tension you point out—the difference between reading to confirm belief versus reading to understand the text fully—is really at the heart of why these two traditions diverge. You could almost frame it as a methodological disagreement: one emphasizes guided interpretation for coherence, the other emphasizes individual interpretation for freedom, even at the cost of consistency.
If you want, I can break down a few concrete examples where Protestants commonly “pick and choose” verses and contrast how Catholics tend to approach the same passages—it’s surprisingly illuminating.