The reason why their work doesn't get the sounding board they think it deserves is because for the most part it their theories don't match the empirical data. They make assumptions which aren't supported by the evidence or only have circumstantial proof. You can't expect everyone to just drop their bundles and go follow the "pied piper" just because he plays a merry tune. Look at Einstein...when he first brought out SR and then GR, there were only 5 or so physicists in the world that could even come close to understanding it. But, fortunately, those physicists were the guys who forged modern physics....Bohr, Dirac etc. It wasn't long before most of the others saw through the complexities and then Einstein became the buzzword for "mad scientist"
And uber famous
. But that's what it takes....you need to be really on your ball if you're going to propose something radical and even then you won't get 100% support. You never do. But, you need to have dotted all the "i's" and crossed all you "t's" before you can expect to be accepted. That's what most of these guys haven't done, and very few of them (if any) are in the same calibre as Einstein, or even Witten, Susskind, Hawking, Guth etc. They are good scientist (Tom van Flandern is an electrical engineer), but they haven't come up with anything startling, despite what may have been written in that article....which devolved into some rather flowery metaphors and nostalgic "yesteryear" nonsense on more than one occasion.
Most of their work would sound reasonable, it has to otherwise they'd just be complete crackpots and not scientists. However, because it sounds ok doesn't make it right. No does everything that "mainstream" says is correct. It's not about who's right or wrong, it's about theory matching observation and making sense in both. Or, in some cases, observation matching a previously proposed theory (or not). If the theory doesn't match the observations, no matter which way they're interpreted, it doesn't matter how "pretty" the theory is....it's wrong!!!. You either go back and play around with it or discard it. If it does match, then you can say that given what we know, the theory is correct.
People get the misguided idea that because these guys come up with a better sounding idea or whatever, they must be right and everyone else is wrong...and/or they've discovered something different no one else knows about. It's not that at all. A careful look at their theories and the observations will show quite clearly that all they have done is reinterpret the data that's already at hand....nothing more or less, and added some of their own ideas to this. Most of them don't work because their is, at the very best, only circumstantial evidence for their interpretations. They also bring up previously discredited ideas or processes/procedures in order to justify their ideas....or invent new ones. That's OK, however it doesn't mean they get a tick for being right again...things get discarded for a reason, procedures/processes don't always apply to every situation or have fallibilities which are well known.
It can be hard to get past the consensus of the general scientific community with new ideas, but it's not impossible. If those new ideas make sense and can be verified.