You may be confused by the time you have finished reading those threads. Don't worry. There is little agreement among grammarians on this point - the answer depends on how you define tense (and aspect and mood). There is almost universal agreement that there are at least two tenses in English, the present (or unmarked) and past (or marked or
Well, I think that no one would argue that there are at least two tenses.
Since there is not an agreed definition of grammatical tense, you need to specify what kind of answer you are looking for. Perhaps the question could be "How many verb forms and syntactic variants are possible in English?"