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I devoted much of my younger baseball studies to the examingation of baseball history, both numerically and through historical representation.  For you to assume that my general dislike for the Carp at third idea comes from ignorance of baseball history is not really fair to me or my position.
I was not knee-jerk reacting...I liked the idea when I first read it...then I thought about it and decided it probably wouldn't work and compared Carp to Ryan Braun in terms of speed.
Carp doesn't have spectacular range at first base either...and even if he did...why then didn't the Mets play Keith Hernandez at third and get their gold glove over there and take their chances with sluggers at first?
I disagree with the notion that the same range is required for third and first.  If that were the case, then the number of 1B Assists and 3B A would be approximately equal...and they're not.  Or at the very least, if that were the case, then when you add first base unassisted putouts and assists they would compare favorably to third base putouts plus assists...and they don't.  There's about a 20% difference.
People are raving about Carp's defense, but he never before profiled (from the scouting perspective...I'm intentionally ignoring sabermetrics here because I don't think we have the data for that assessment yet) as a particularly adept first baseman.  In fact, scouts were saying he was not good enough defensively to justify a big league job if he didn't pound out thirty longballs...the Olerud path wouldn't work for him because he was a mediocre fielder.  Maybe he's made a few web-gem grabs, but defense cannot really be observed wiht only the eye...and especially at first base where the difficult plays get made almost before the camera even gets lined up to see them.
I am inclined to continue to believe the scouts when theys say that first base is much easier to play than third.  I'm also inclined to believe the scouts when they say that Carp is only OK at first, meaning he'll be poor at third.  There's a range of how poor he'd be, maybe he'd be tolerably bad, I don't know.  But I am not inclined to make that switch and potentially screw him up at the plate when he's just grooving it in.  We don't need to do that.