[AGarvin]

Trying to understand many of the concepts behind relativity frequently raises these types of questions, but the fact is that no matter how many ways you think of to take pictures of clocks in misguided thought experiments, time dilation is a very real property of the physical universe as we understand it, and pretty much the entire professional physics community agrees and has agreed for decades. These "unsatisfyingly small" amounts that are cited as experimental proof can be exceedingly large amounts in the world of physics.

Time dilation centres around the invariance of the speed of light for all frames of reference and this has been included in a whole bevy of areas from the Lorentz Transformations to Schwarzchild geometry, and these are not thought experiments, but solid mathematical theories, many of which are backed by observational or experimental proofs.

Yes, future research may have us alter or even rewrite areas, but there is a much bigger picture here than simply arguing it is wrong because it is not understood.