[Verginius Rufus]

If you look at the title page of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica it has the imprimatur ("let it be printed") of Samuel Pepys, the President of the Royal Society. I don't know if that means that Pepys personally accepted Newton's ideas or just saw no reason not to allow them to be published. Newton was a member of the Royal Society.

[who_would_fardels_bear]

They were accepted but only reluctantly. My understanding is that other Natural Philosophers at the same time had come to similar conclusions before Newton but were reluctant to publish for lack of a mechanism.

Before Einstein had discovered the photo-electric effect, scientists had come up with a formula to approximate what they actually saw with regard to black body radiation. This formula anticipated the effects of light being quantized, but again, was not attached to any specific mechanism so was viewed as a half-measure with regard to addressing the ultraviolet catastrophe.