If your goal is to get gold and not to just do alchemy, then upon discovering that alchemy is stupid you turn to different angles of attack. You don't need to know whether SIAI's current approach is right, you only need to know whether there are capable people working on the problem there, who really want to solve the problem and not just create appearance of solving the problem, and who won't be bogged down by pursuit of lost causes. Ensuring the latter is of course a legitimate concern.