Not a physicist (theoretical or otherwise), but to me the introduction of the concept of "hidden variables" reminds me of the addition of Phlogiston to the body of knowledge.
Unless... they're using it as a placeholder for as-yet undiscovered ways that entangled particles can interact, and it's known that it's a placeholder.
So Satan was the angel that made reality work by using global variables. He was cast out by god for violating the coding standard. All the evil you see in the world is the result of errors caused by the use of global variables and a lack of sufficient testing prior to release that was the result of an unreasonable schedule that was pulled out of God's ass simply because he wanted to prove he could make the angels ship something in six days.
Hm I don't think the issue with Phlogiston was that we didn't know what it was, but that rather than try to use the scientific method to make predictions about it, they just wrote down "when a, do b, Phlogiston does x".
In this case they are doing experiments where they expect the hidden variables to do a very specific job (transmit information) and are trying to test whether they do what they expect them to do or not.
Unless... they're using it as a placeholder for as-yet undiscovered ways that entangled particles can interact, and it's known that it's a placeholder.