Do you really, honestly not see the problem here?
Yes I do. You and I cannot appear to have a rational discussion on this (Jeezooos holy mofo???) because you seem to be nitpicking anything I write. I suspect that I am hitting one of your buttons, similar to if I talked to someone about their religion. For some people, science is religion. I do not know about you, but it appears that way since you have not once discussed science here, but merely leveled accustations at me of attacking scientists. That is the main thing that you have focused on. You appear to be mostly ignoring anything else I write and I haven't seen anything to indicate that you have actually researched those areas that I have discussed yourself. Science is religion for me, but one that I try to be objective about and not just believe everything I read about it.
And yes, I know several scientists in several different fields. The one I talk to the most has a PhD from MIT in chemistry. My wife's cousin has a PhD in molecular genetics and microbiology from Duke. All of the ones I know are good hard working people. I even had an Email correspondence with a physicist for over a year that I did not know at all. Great guy who helped me a lot by pointing me to papers that I never would have ever read. He didn't need to do that, but he did. I wouldn't actually mind starting a correspondence with Umbran because he is always level headed here. And, it's extremely likely that my daughter will become a (probably PhD) scientist. Within a bit over a decade, I will most likely have a scientist in the family who will have scientist colleagues in at least her field (whose brains I might one day get to pick ).
I actually think that the vast majority of branches of science are very very well researched (not well funded, but well researched) and I wasn't really discussing those. I was discussing the more theoretical areas (like Kip Thorne and his silly time machine proposal which started this discussion). I apologize that by using the term scientist, I misled you to infer that I was talking about all scientific branches. I was trying to be more specific with my examples.
Thousands of years ago (even without Pythagoras), anyone with a brain could climb a tower or a mountain and tell that the world was curved by looking out over the ocean. Many learned people (and not just in Greece) knew this at the time (some seafarers knew that the world was at least curved by seeing just the masts of other ships at a distance). But, the prevailing theory was that the Earth was flat nearly everywhere around the world.
Dark Matter theories (and some other theoretical aspects of science, possibly like string theory) are the Flat Earth theories of our day and age. The signs are there, but some people refuse to see them. You can disagree with that, but it's probably just a matter of time before they fall by the wayside. I base this on my biased unlearned but heavily read opinion. One just needs to do a lot of reading and read between the lines. And, my opinion doesn't mean squat. But, I'm a patient person and can wait to see how it all shakes out.
I'll leave it at that.