posterior on the baryon acoustic feature

I asked the BOSS galaxy-clustering team about my concerns about measuring the baryon acoustic feature by first making a point estimate of the two-point correlation function of galaxies and then, from that two-point function estimate, inferring the baryon acoustic feature length scale. I got no sympathy. Maybe I am wrong, but I feel like if we are going to move the information from the data to the BAF, we need to write down a likelihood. The reason the BOSSes think I am wrong (and maybe I am) is because on large scales the density field is close to a Gaussian random field, and the two-point function is a sufficient statistic. But the reason I think they might be wrong is (a) the distribution of galaxies is a non-linear sampling of the density field, and (b) the two-point function might be sufficient to describe the density, but a point estimate of the two-point function is not the two-point function. Anyway, I retreated, and resolved to either drop it or do the math.