You correctly decry popularity as a non-rational measure of veracity, but to the extent that it expresses a sort of straw poll, it may be a good indicator anyway. The idea of expert futures markets comes to mind.

My point is related: is it not also a fallacy to assert it's GOT to be simple? That's awful close to demanding (even believing?) something's true because it ought to be, because we want it so bad. Occam's razor has worked like a champ all these years but inference is risky and maybe now, we find ourselves confronted with some hard digging. I too hope some crystalline simplification will make everything make sense, but I don't think we've a right to expect that, or should. What you and I want doesn't matter.