Would it were NOT true?!

 "If only it were true"
"He says it as if it were true"

I can't recite the exact function of words like "would", "were", "it", "and" etc...but I know damn well "would it were true" is nothing more than a mishmash of words.  They try to justify its existence as "The subjunctive mood".  WTF?  Is that a sophisticated way of saying "incoherent mutter"?

But given that it seems to be a very commonly used incoherent mutter, it seems maybe I'm also the only one who thinks the sentence that opens this Facebook post could benefit from some re-wording.

It SEEMS, based on the way I learned how to talk (American English), that it SHOULD say "Van Gogh, in being himself, resulted in distinction and success,..."  I have no idea how to read that sentence without pretending it has a different sequence of words on the page.  When I first tried reading that, I went through it 3 times and had to go backwards and see if I missed something.  I've learned through reading broken English all over the web that if you just continue looking at the other words used, you can figure out what the author was probably trying to convey.