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Yeah it's unfortunate that Kepler went bad and the 7xx day apparent period meant only 2 passes of "the object(s)" were captured properly. Especially because some irregular (disintegrating?) occulter(s) not in orbit around tabbys star would seem to be a good fit, that would then be expected to affect nearby stars in similar ways eventually. It seems like that's what the new papers authors investigated, but without the same precision as available in the original run... there's a lot of uncertainty in drawing conclusions one way or the other. It may wind up another "Wow!" signal...
I think it should be noted that the comet swarm hypothesis is somewhat misrepresented as being strongly promoted by Boyajian et al in this paper and a lot of the popsci articles including news.com.au's when it was much more of "the only one not conclusively ruled out straight away apart from Omg It's Aliens!". They had to propose some kind of explanation...
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