People have known how to deal with smoking lesion (under a different name) since the 18th century (hint: the solution is not the EDT solution):

http://www.e-publications.org/ims/submission/STS/user/submissionFile/12809?confirm=bbb928f0

The trick is to construct a system that deals with things 20 times more complicated than smoking lesion. That system is recent, and you will have to read e.g. my thesis, or Jin Tian's thesis, or elsewhere to see what it is.

I have yet to see anyone advocating EDT actually handle a complicated example correctly. Or even a simple tricky example, e.g. the front door case.