Kevin_Axion said:
... let's just settle our differences and realize that they won't change ...
I think we will choose not to, at this point, Kevin. Because the topic in Dax opener is the role of phenomena (observation, experiment, measurement, prediction...) in the development of physical theory. It is a general issue, more interesting than stringy specifics.
And some phenomenologists, possibly to the dismay of some Loop theorists, have recently determined LQG to be falsifiable by observation of the polarization in ancient light.
Some of these phenomenologists (whose past work has involved several other theories besides Loop) are Aurelien Barrau, Julien Grain, Wen Zhao. There are a half-dozen others who have co-authored with one or more of these in a series of papers.
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2983268#post2983268
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=3262&cpage=1#comment-67952
Zhao is at Cardiff, Barrau is at Grenoble (sometime CERN), Grain is at Paris.
What happened is kind of intriguing. The work of Ashtekar's Penn State group, and many others, has confirmed since 2006 that the bounce is a highly robust conclusion from Loop cosmology. Meanwhile a lot of bridges have been built between the full (spinfoam) LQG theory and the application to cosmology. One can even start with a simple spinfoam version of LQG and derive a bounce.
Possibly to some Loop theorists' surprise, Barrau and friends have determined that a Loop bounce must have a particular signature in the B-mode polarization of ancient light. It puts LQG at risk and is either interesting or exciting depending on one's moral character and point of view.
This may put several persons' noses out of joint and they may have nasty things to say about it

---scorn denial etc. We can't predict but it will be instructive to see the reaction. Someone will probably mention Lee Smolin, but this whole thing has nothing to do with Smolin or any of his current research. It is basically on Ashtekar and Rovelli's plate and you need to know their recent work to comment intelligently.
To summarize:
The conservative Baconian stance taken in Dax opening post is pragmatically correct. And quantum gravity theory is going to move ahead in concert with experiment/observation whether you like it or not.