Very nice breakdown of the history of the neutrino! I fully agree. Whether a theory is a conceptual desaster or not is completely unrelated to its success. And I totally get that the hope of physicists is that such theories continue to be successful, since it means new physics which can be discovered. But, still if there is a theory that manages to explain observations, without postulating an otherwise unmeasurable quantity, Ockham’s razor tells you that it would be reasonable to prefer those.
