Of course he looks backwards. You can't analyze why any discovery didn't happen sooner, even though all the pieces were there, unless you look backwards. I thought the case study of SR was quite illuminating, though it goes directly counter to his attack on string theory. After getting the Lorentz transform, it took a surprisingly long time to for anyone to treat the transformed quantities as equivalent -- that is, to take the math seriously. And for string theory, he says they take the math too seriously. Of course, the Lorentz transform was more clearly grounded in observed physical phenomenon.

I completely agree he doesn't understand contemporary developments, and that was some of what I referred to as "pinging my crank-detectors", along with the loose analogy between 4-d bending in "world tubes" to that in 3-d rods. I don't necessarily see that as a huge problem if he's not pretending to be able to offer us the next big revolution on a silver platter.