I was going to make a similar comment, but you phrased it better than I could have. It's easy to say in hindsight that X knew Y, but there's a big difference between knowing something and just suspecting it.

In fact, at the time the evidence for many models was equally strong. So, based on the limited available evidence of the day it actually would have been incorrect to believe too strongly in any model, even the one that we now know to be better than the others.