Actually, you are exactly right. Most of these exotics are conjured up as fudges, patches and kludges to theories that have served us well for years, that are starting to show a little wear around the edges as new, unexplainable data starts coming in. No one wants to throw the old theories away altogether because they have served us so well in the past, and there isn't anything comprehensive to replace them, so they keep adding fixes and bandaids to the old explanations.

It was a lot like this around the turn of the 20th century as relativity and quantum were starting to creep in. People were trying all sorts of gimmicks to try and save what obviously had some merit, the Classical Physics of Newton and Maxwell, but which couldn't make sense of the new data coming from the big observatories and the quantum labs.

I don't think physicists and cosmologists take any of these newfangled ideas very seriously, but they smell blood in the water. They know something is about to happen and they want to be there when it shows up. These are exciting times, and I expect the breakthrough any day now, from either the Cern collider or one of the new orbiting observatories.

These guys haven't a clue what is going on, but the neat thing is that they love it when it's like that. They wouldn't have it any other way. And I hope I am alive when the big news finallly breaks.

Will the big breakthrough finally bring it all together, the comprehensive Theory of Everything that everyone is hoping for? No one knows, or can know, but I suspect it won't. We may never get to the final answer, there may not even be one. After all, we have no guarantee that nature actually makes sense. We just like to think it does.