Its just that sometimes you hear the wacky stuff people are comming up with and it makes you think if they are even anywhere near whats really happening here. Even if the math is correct, the argment from incredulity is overwhelming with a direct proportion to wackiness.
I think the reason this is being persued so far ahead of the experimental evidience is the enormous success of doing that kind of thing before. Both relativity and quantum mechanics went, in some cases, a long way ahead of experiment. Both are still being tested in new ways after a century.
Both produce results that are utterly wacky. Both have been supported enormously well by experiment.
The approach was very successful.
The lesson learned is that if you can find mathematics that naturally gives know values for some things (masses of particles, e.g.) then the other things it has to say have a good chance of representing reality (however wacky). Of course, all the theoreticians want the experimental checks and the direction that experiment can guide them in. In the meantime, there is a LOT of work to be done to find math that hangs together well enough. It doesn't yet but still gives interesting insites into where experiments might probe.