Are you saying that the best book (and thus the model) is 30 years old and the best experiments are 20 years old?

No, the best book I know of, about the core model of NLP: that everything we call "thinking" consists of manipulating sensory information, in one form or another, and that cognitive algorithms consist of transforming, combining, and comparing information across different sensory systems.

30 years ago, that was a revolutionary idea; now, it's not actually that far off the beaten track, in that there's recent mainstream support for a many of its ideas. (NLP had near/far distinctions 20 years ago, for example, and the critical role of physical sensations in mental recognition of emotions.)

How about the experiments that went into proposing the model? To paraphrase someone, how was this model carved out of existence? Which information led to its identification contrary to the thousands of crackpot 'theories' of the mind?

Bandler was editing books on therapy, listening to recordings of some very successful therapists, and noticed some interesting commonalities in their language. He talked to a linguistics professor at his college, who noticed it too.

Building on Bateson and Korzybski, they put together a linguistic model of information processing, to show how surface language structure reflects deep structure -- i.e., what something says about how you're likely thinking, grounded in what the therapists were doing to identify broken internal models in their clients.

In other words, they noticed that the successful therapists were noticing certain patterns of things people said, and then asking questions that forced the clients to reconsider their mental model of a situation.

Now, if this sounds familiar, it's because REBT and CBT are based on the exact same thing, just without - AFAIK - as precise of a model as the linguistic one developed by B&G. And AFAIK, B&G described it first.

In my original version of this post, I went on to describe how they got to other models -- that also now have experimental support -- but it got bloody long. Short version: they got microexpressions first too, AFAIK, although they didn't claim them to be universal. NLP practice drills focus on recognizing what the person in front of you is doing, not what everyone in the world might do.

And what is your obsession with self-experimentation?

That it produces useful results for the experimenter.