Why does the Cauchy-Schwarz Inequality even have a name? When I came across the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality the other day, I found it really weird that this was its own thing, and it had lines upon lines of proof.
I've always thought the geometric definition of dot multiplication: 
$$|{\bf a }||{\bf b }|\cos \theta$$ is equivalent to the other, algebraic definition: $$a_1\cdot b_1+a_2\cdot b_2+\cdots+a_n\cdot b_n$$
And since the inequality is directly implied by the geometric definition (the fact that $\cos(\theta)$ is $1$ only when $\bf a$ and $\bf b$ are collinear), then shouldn't the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality be the world's most obvious and almost-no-proof-needed thing?
Can someone correct me on where my thought process went wrong?

Flip your argument around. The Cauchy-Schwarz inequality makes thinking about angles seem outmodish, vestigial, obsolete. You don't need protractors to do geometric analysis anymore. You just need algebra: just one quadratic inequality. So much of what your proof using $\cos \theta$ has been doing only requires a simple algebraic inequality, and neither $\cos$ nor $\theta$.
Why algebra is important is out of scope to this answer.
