One really needs to look to the motivations behind aerodynamic theories before dismissing anything as 'dumb'.
Prandtl was inspired by the success of Lilianthal and the Wrights....
Whoa! Hold on. Perhaps my mistake for not reading Gibson's original article to see exactly what he condemns, but Prandtl's work is not at issue here. The "conspiracy theories" I'm thinking of are those that persist that aerodynamics has been "wrong" all these years, that engineers don't know how wings "work" and that a naive application of Newton's laws rides in to the rescue like the seventh cavalry.