If a person were sufficiently intrigued by the phenomenon to have the motivation to explore it in greater depth than is expressed in the words, "Oh, that's interesting; I wonder what it's all about!" (in my experience this generally only comes about through having personal contact with someone who makes some very precise statements about events in one's life via the birthchart, leading one to wonder, "How the hell could s/he know that!"), and they had a scholarly approach, they would of course first perform an exhaustive search of the literature, and discover that all the kinds of studies proposed in this thread have already been done. To ask for evidence of the validity of astrology in a forum such as this, however, while remaining ignorant of (and seemingly disinterested in) all that prior research and discussion, shows a lack of seriousness that cannot be productive of anything except confirming one in the correctness of one's belief (in the invalidity of astrology).
Of course, given the difficulty in tracking down a lot of these research materials (many only in specialist journals that are, obviously, not held in academic library collections), one would have to be highly motivated – and probably on the spectrum like you and I – to even come to learn of their existence. I would even argue that unless you are such an atypical case, ready to go to the ends of the earth to get to the bottom of it, and willing to suffer mockery, ridicule, and ostracisation in that single-minded pursuit, then it is much better indeed to just write it off as a load of rubbish (while perhaps maintaining in online forums that one is "open to looking at the evidence" and then taking it from there...).
My point in participating in this thread was not to advance arguments in favour of astrology, but simply to point out that the obvious historically-unaware, "hard science" approach would yield nothing of value (apart from supporting the prejudicial beliefs of those already convinced that it's all a load of rubbish).
For the record, my own association with astrology has been almost entirely historical for over a decade, and I have no urge to convince anyone of its "truth-fiction" (unlike some devout materialists, here and everywhere, who – plainly or otherwise – are all too eager to point out at every opportunity that hard science = unhyphenated truth, and things like astrology = unhyphenated fiction).