The hot fusion people have not made the claims that the CFers have. They have steadily built their knowledge base.
Theory has everything to do with how one views data. If one ignores the double slit experiment (for example) then light and its travel becomes very troublesome and confusing. If one does not understand nonlocal interaction then spooky action at a distance leaves one with all sorts of unexplained data.
Go back to your spectroscopy. It is where you are best suited to make evaluations
Wrong. Theory is all well and good, and if experiments agree with it, that "does" add to the knowledge base of science. But ignoring "anomalies" that contradict theory is flatly stupid, because it is from those anomalous results that NEW and unexpected science emerges. Most of them will indeed probably prove to be errors, but those that pan out with replicable data open up new theories (and occasionally kill old ones).
"Go back to your spectroscopy. It is where you are best suited to make evaluations..."
LOL....any place a measurement is made is grist for my mill (and not just spectroscopy....neither of my R&D100 awards were in spectroscopy...nor were they in the same area of applied science).