"First, they aren't magic."
Exactly.
As for your whole paragraph, I completely agree. I find it encouraging that the FTL community is slowly gaining respectability, as humans tend to be able to figure out ways of doing things, if they can wrap their minds around the required concepts.
Some physicists have had basic problems with relativity all along. Ives and Bridgman have been the most coherent. It's not really the relativity to which they object, but the application. It's not easy to work in tensors and quaternions, although both are in common enough use thanks to computers, but deciding when to apply them and what to apply them to requires something more of the understanding than blindly saying laws are valid in all frames, because they aren't necessarily.