Gould turned Goldschmidt's "hopeful monster" hypothesis from pariah to mainstream with his theory of punctuated equilibrium - which has been well-borne-out in every good, gene-level-detailed computer simulation of evolution that I've seen.

That is simply bizarre. I'm going to have to ask for references. Two references, in fact.

One would be a quote from any mainstream evolutionary biologist other than Gould which uses the phrases "hopeful monster" and "punctuated equilibrium" in the same paragraph. If you cannot find one, a quote from Gould would do. According to wikipedia, the association of the two ideas is a creationist distortion. Googling the two phrases seems to bear that out.

The second would be a link to any paper reporting a good, gene-level-detailed computer simulation of evolution which backs up your claim.