I may be completely off base in my thinking here, but Nuimshaan may have a point.
Imagine that a star became visible to eyes on earth by *insert star formation method here * back in, say, 150,000 BCE, and that that visible star wasn't catalogued until say, 600 CE. In, say, 1975, this star was found by parallax, red shift, etc... to be 300000 light years away. I think he's saying that since we don't know exactly when that light became visible to us here on earth, the age of that star is impossible to know. If we'd have been on earth to make a measurement of 300000 light years away at the moment the star became visible, we'd know that it was born about 300000 years ago...
However...
That's not to say that star is still around. The star could have been blown apart by evil spacefarers 3000 years after it was formed (work with me here), and thus we'd be viewing it not as it is, which is a bunch of space debris and heat, but as it was, which is a nice, pretty star.
But again, I may be talking way out of my arse. Anyone?
I think that quite a lot of your trouble comes from the fact that you stronly underestimate the lifetime of stars. Even very short living stars live easely a few
billions of years. Even with our knowledge now, we can't estimate the age of stars with the accuracy of hundredthousands of years. So your whole argument is baseless.
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