Hi Isilwen. Welcome to CF. I hope you don't mind me chiming in, because I've been in your position, though I obviously made a different choice than the one you are considering in terms of church.
Anyway, regarding any antagonism...yeah, they'll do that.
I wish I had a better answer, but it seems to be part of human nature, in that if you are convinced that you are in the right place (as the people who are coming down on your for your decision must either think they are or are trying to project and convince themselves that they are; there's no way to know) then it seems unthinkable that other people may have looked at the same evidence and come to a different conclusion than you did. If it's right because
it is what is true (i.e., not because they/you were born into it, or for any other reason), then obviously everything that isn't it is at least
somewhat false, or at least wrong. This is a position you'll find among Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, etc. -- basically every traditional Church, though not all of them express it in the same exact way.
So to withstand it (and that's all you can really do; you can't change your detractors' minds for them), it is necessary to be very sure of your decision. I wouldn't rush into anything, for that very reason. I myself took about three years (2009-2012) to pray, study, and really work out what I should do and where I should be after I finally accepted that I couldn't be in the RC communion anymore. Would I go back to the Presbyterian Church I had been baptized in as an infant, or would I go somewhere else, and if so where, etc. These are hard questions. My most honest advice would be just to go and see. Checklists are fine, but especially since you're going to try to stick to some form of liturgical Christianity, you know that you won't be worshiping together with your checklist, but with other human beings.
Find your local Episcopalian or whatever kind of parish and check them out.
I must disagree with your contention that history is written by the victors, though. There are histories written by every people and every church, and the RCC's is just their take on things; if it seems like it dominates everything that's because you're probably only seeing their side or the side of those that are within their orbit (since Protestantism didn't start in the Christian East or in response to anything on there, but within the Western/Roman Church itself). And as far as 'victors' or winners and losers are concerned, I think I can say without besmirching its holy name that my Church definitively lost at the Council of Chalcedon, in the sense that we did not successfully bring the majority present to reject the Tome of Leo, and have remained a distinct minority in the Christian world ever since due to our steadfastness in refusing to compromise the faith as we have received it. Yet we have had at least since the tenth century in my own particular Church (earlier in the others of the communion, like the Syriac Orthodox) many histories written by illustrious bishops like HG Bishop Severus El Ashmunein (10th century), HG Bishop Youanis (modern; d. 1987), priests like Ibn Kabar of the Hanging Church/Al Moallaqa (14th century), and laypeople like Aziz S. Atiya, Iris Habib El Masri, or Maged S.A. Mikhail. (All modern)
They're still on my bookshelf, and some of them are even published by major publishers (Atiya's
History of Eastern Christianity was published by the University of Notre Dame Press, and has had several reprintings since its original publication in the 1960s). The fact that they represent a minority or 'losing' viewpoint is immaterial, unless the default is to expect absolutely everything to align with the Western/Greco-Roman/imperial/Chalcedonian view
just because (it is so correct). And I'm sure there are many Protestant-authored histories with which the RCC and its faithful would dispute, but you can still get Foxe's
Book of Martyrs for under $10 (or free, if you sign for a free trial of Audible) at Amazon.com, so y'know...don't take it as a given that the RC either does or should dominate the Christian world just because they've written a lot of histories. So has everyone else, it's just sometimes a bit more difficult to find them.