The theory has its problems, some of them are serious problems.
I attended a talk by Verlinde and he is well aware of them, but I liked his answer. He basically said that even if this theory was not a valid alternative to dark matter and was eventually proven wrong, some of their results looked very interesting and could develop into different theories, so he thought that it was worth to keep going further with this line of research.
Nevertheless, you could feel that he still had some hope they could fix these problems in some way. But it looked to me like this feeling was more a personal desire than real scientific expectations.
Why would you like such an answer? If proven wrong, then it's wrong -- why continue studying it?
A better answer is that dark matter is itself not free of problems either, so maybe some effort should be devoted to not-dark-matter theories. The entropic gravity theory space costs very little to fund by comparison to dark matter, so it's a reasonable thing to continue funding some of it for now.
> Why would you like such an answer? If proven wrong, then it's wrong -- why continue studying it?
Because things are not black or white.
It is never clear what we get from the advancement in physics theories, but many times we get more profit from the journey than from the final results. If Einstein equations can be derived from thermodynamic laws, this may have some very deep meaning, even if we still need dark matter to make cosmology models work.
At this point, we have no perfect theory, you could say that all they have been proven wrong in some way or another, and yet, many of them are useful.
I do not know enough about physics to know if this is the most practical way to spend funding, but from the personal viewpoint of Verlinde, I think it makes sense to keep working on his theory until a totally unsolvable problem is found. But this is only my impression after attending a layman talk, I am far from being expert.
I attended a talk by Verlinde and he is well aware of them, but I liked his answer. He basically said that even if this theory was not a valid alternative to dark matter and was eventually proven wrong, some of their results looked very interesting and could develop into different theories, so he thought that it was worth to keep going further with this line of research.
Nevertheless, you could feel that he still had some hope they could fix these problems in some way. But it looked to me like this feeling was more a personal desire than real scientific expectations.