First of all, I'm not sure what measure you're using for "rigorous thought". Is it a binary classification? Are there degrees of rigor? I can infer from some of your examples what kind of pattern you might be picking up on, but if we're going to try and say things like "there's a correlation between rigor and volume of publication", I'd like to at least see a rough operational definition of what you mean by rigor.

The important thing is that I categorized people as rigorous or non-rigorous first, then found a difference between the groups. That suggests there's some relevant distinction in my mental model

If I'd made an operational definition, I'd have been testing the operational definition, not my mental model, and the definition might not have matched very well. Better to consult the oracle in my head.

I agree that what I'm saying would be more clear to you if I'd tried to define rigor afterwards. Certainly not being well-liked or influential. Zizek, Derrida, and Lacan are all well-liked and very influential today. Spinoza is not as influential as Nietzsche.

I consider Nietzsche not rigorous because he's upfront about not being rigorous, about not even considering it an issue. The Superman doesn't stop and try to figure out if he's correct. Nietzsche does philosophy by telling stories, not by defending propositions.

I consider Freud not rigorous because he made hypothesis but didn't test them (AFAIK). He told a lot of just-so stories, without contrasting them with alternative explanations. Similar thing with Marx. More a storyteller than a scientist.

I consider Lysenko not rigorous because instead of arguing with his opponents, he had them sent to Siberia and got a law passed saying it was illegal to argue with him.

I consider Hegel not rigorous because nobody can figure out what a lot of the stuff he wrote means, or if it means anything.

I also consider Stein not rigorous because nobody can figure out what she meant. She wrote like a stroke victim. Her book How to Write begins with 3 untranslated sentences in French, then says:

When he will see When he will see When he will see the land of liberty. The scene changes it is a stone high up against with a hill and there is and above where they will have time.

George Steiner is a curious case. He's very rigorous in considering the meanings and connotations of his words. But he doesn't believe reality is knowable, so he has no interest in whether anything he says is true.

I consider Spinoza rigorous because he wrote in the 17th century, and yet confined himself to meaningful statements and inferences that he could draw based on evidence. His reputation is not very high IMHO because he was so rigorous that he said mainly things we now take for granted and consider obvious.

I consider Robert Penn Warren rigorous because he looks at a story as something that communicates the author's opinions about life through the logical relationships between the different components of the story, and he illustrates this by going through dozens of stories and showing what the intended communication is and how the components interact to support it.

I consider I. A. Richards rigorous because he took stories, showed them to students, asked them to interpret them, and astounded everybody by demonstrating that university literature students understood much less of what was generally thought to be meant in those stories than literary critics believed the general public did.

Jon von Neumann was either rigorous in his thought, or magical.

I don't think I had any good justification for listing Minsky. I think I meant to contrast him with somebody else from MIT from some of the sloppy "look how cool my robot / simulation is" work done there, but was too lazy to put in the time to justify a choice.

Wiles wrote a humongous proof that has withstood (with some provisos that I don't understand) the scrutiny of many mathematicians.

Robert Frost is probably the most controversial. I listed him because his work is very tight. His poems have a surface meaning and one or more deeper meanings, and they communicate clearly enough to bring you to contemplate that deeper meaning, rather than (as most modernist poetry does) merely enough to let you contemplate what that deeper meaning might be.