There are more options:
The uncreated Qur’an was Revealed to RasulAllah but he was the one who put it into human words, so the Qur’an with Allah is uncreated but the Qur’an with us is a created manifestation from the Prophet
The Qur’an with Allah is uncreated but Allah created the human language manifestation of it, not being the words of the Prophet (Ash’aris)
The Qur’an is created since Allah does not Speak in a literal fashion and that’s anthropomorphism (Mu’tazilah)
The Qur’an is uncreated and was codified as uncreated, but the codification process involved human ijtihad (most Sunni ulama in the past)
The Qur’an is uncreated and was codified as uncreated and what we have between our hands is a perfect representation of that (what the layman believes)
- The Qur’an is uncreated however our recitation when it comes out of our mouths is created, but the Words and Ayat themselves are not (lafzhiyyah/Bukhari)
- The Qur’an is uncreated but our experience and perception of it is a creation, and the creation can experience the Creator/Uncreated however that experience itself is creataed (my own working theory
The main issue is not fallibility, even the Mu’tazilah believe that the Qur’an is perfect. The issue is about Allah’s Essence. Does monotheism require that we have a God Whom is known primarily from negatives (Allah is not like the creation, He does not Speak because speech is a human thing, He is not composed of Attributes, He does not have emotions) or is monotheism a positive outlook (Allah Speaks, He has Speech, He has Attributes, He is known through His Self-Description).
If you think that Allah is totally incomprehensible to the human mind, then all of the Qur’anic descriptions of Him are totally metaphorical, and the only thing we are capable of doing is ruling out what Allah is not. If you think that Allah is comprehensible to a certain degree, then the Qur’anic descriptions of Him are real, and we can accept them on face value according to our understanding. The Asha’irah tried to reconcile these two.
The best argument ustadh made, to me at least, was the argument from usul al-hadith. Ibn Mujahid requiring ‘izza in the riwayat is not how Sunni scholars look at things, and even ibn al-Jazari only required one sahih sanad hundreds of years later.
Ustadh’s presentation of the Mu’tazili argument is: If the Qur’an is something uncreated, then how is it possible that so much human influence is involved in what we consider to be the Qur’an? When you sit down and open the mus’haf and read it, you cannot argue that any of the specific dots on the letters or the tashkil came from the Prophet. Furthermore, even the masa’hif of the Sahabah had differences and the Sahabah would use synonyms.
If the Qur’an is the Uncreated Verbatim Speech of Allah, then how could it be acceptable for humans to switch out: vowelization, letters, and even entire words? How could it be that some du’a were considered Qur’an at one point and then not Qur’an at another point?
We do not know for sure exactly how the Prophet recited or even exactly what he recited in every case. As a result of that ignorance, many people exercised ijtihad to come to their best conclusion. What we have now is a product of that ijtihad, and we know for sure that that ijtihad is not Divine. Therefore, either what we have now is not Qur’an entirely but a mix of Qur’an and then ijtihad to make up for what was lost, or the Qur’an was never intended to be seen as this totally sacrosanct Word of God.