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Douglas_Knight comments on The Graviton as Aether - Less Wrong
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If it were true that SR were necessary for GR, then SR would be a tremendous improvement on its competitors. really! I get that! But I don't see much reason to believe it. It looks like hagiography (=history rewritten because of hero-worship; probably FALSE) to me. I have not read Poincare, but I am skeptical his take was inadequate. Minkowski seems a big improvement over everyone else. If it took SR to produce Minkowski, then that's good for SR. Minkowski claims to be in Einstein's tradition. But maybe that's just because they're both German. (nationality was a pretty good predictor of people's views on the matter; I think nationalism was a big part of it.)
I'll think about this some and come back. The whole history is fascinating because the way SR and GR are usually explained (on television and in other popular treatments) it is as if Einstein was just sitting around and used his genius to invent it all whole cloth. So we have all this mythology about what a genius the guy was but the actual story looks like it is more about the collective power of science, of the process, than of one man's brilliance. Given what Lorentz and Poincare accomplished it seems pretty plausible that it wouldn't have taken more than 10-15 years for someone else to come up with SR- it probably would have been even less. Maybe the retrospective view doesn't convey scientific revolutions well but I don't even get the sense the Einstein was especially smarter than his contemporaries.
It seems to be a common view among phycisists that SR someone else would have come up with sooner or later (probably sooner), but GR required a critical insight so rare that had Einstein not existed, we might still not have an adequate theory of gravitation.
Once David Hilbert became aware of the problem, he almost beat Einstein to the punch.
ETA: Actually, looking at the history, it seems that Hilbert's interest in physics and mathematical prowess is not evidence that he could have come up with the necessary physical insight. He didn't become interested in GR until well after Einstein had laid the groundwork.