Every sentence you write is contradicting yourself.
Yoda and Mace are the top 2 guys of the entire organization. They’re the ones with the most (almost only?) onscreen speaking roles in scenes where the council actually talks. If they’re not the issue then who are you talking about? Ki Adi?
Yes, exactly, they send them specifically to figure out the Sith. Mace says they’re going to use all their resources on it, and he says they will discover Maul’s identity. So clearly they were not “barely concerned.”
How are any of the sentences I wrote a contradiction?
I don’t think I stated that any individual jedi was an issue. I moreso referred to the idea of the jedi’s arrogance, and that I think that didn’t necessarily make them bullheaded or pompous, more barely concerned, or lax or lack of a better term, to me.
And I think if they were so concerned about the idea of a sith, sending 1 jedi and a padawan wasn’t a showcase of it, to me. But I also think them sending Qui and Obi were more about the Naboo issue than the sith thing as a whole. To be specific, your quote doesn’t read as them “caring a lot” to me, more an acknowledgement of a possibility and willingness to pursue seeking an answer. Like I said, not, to me, a reading of pompousness or bullheadedness. I said before I think it’s a bit more generous read of them, to me, that they simply refused to accept the notion but wanted to find out anyway just in case, though perhaps that was a bit harsher than I may have intended.
You’re getting to my point, which is that Out of Universe, we know that they don’t end up following up on Darth Maul or the Sith very well. In Universe, with what is actually depicted and said in The Phantom Menace, they do care and they will follow up. You’re reading it in retroactively that Mace doesn’t actually mean what he says there, and then interpreting that as proud or aloof (I don’t care how you phrase it, please don’t repeat the phrase about bullheaded or pompous.) But that’s an Out of Universe judgment after Lucas chose not to put certain things in the following movies, not an outlook of the characters in this movie.
Likewise Out of Universe we say that it was dumb to only send Qui Gon and Obi Wan to potentially fight Darth Maul because Out of Universe we know exactly what happens next, and because we like to play backseat driver. But it was just that, dumb, not uncaring. Tactically incompetent. In Universe, the motivation wasn’t “nah let’s get Qui Gon and Obi Wan killed, who cares”, it’s some combination of “let’s treat this political situation carefully” and “they’re very capable Jedi, they can handle this.” It’s obviously considered still part of the Naboo situation which is probably why they don’t want to escalate it to a holy war right away, sight unseen.