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Thanks.

Uniformitarianism doesn't have to be so strict that there aren't catastrophic events.

That misses the not-so-subtle century and a half or so of strictly political struggle against catastrophe (of any kind) as an explanation for anything. There is still resistance to the consequences of impacts from space (or even the reality thereof) on Earth, on the Moon, on Mars...

The egregiously ad hoc approach that is taken is to claim that uniformitarian views always took catastrophic events into account. That claim is false. The Channelled Scablands flood event was first realized in 1923; the source for the water was identified around 1940; the theory wasn't generally accepted until 1965; others went to their graves sometime therafter, not accepting it.

Here's an example of an apologist in action:

Channeled Scablands: Overview
by Steven Dutch
University of Wisconsin - Green Bay
9 April 2003, Last Update 21 November 2003
Beginning in 1923, J. Harlan Bretz began arguing that the curious channeled terrain of Washington State was the result of stupendous floods. This idea was highly controversial. It is, of course, easy to bash Bretz's critics in hindsight, until we recall that catastrophist theories are a dime a dozen and are often the lazy way to explain phenomena. In 1925, J.T Pardee suggested that sudden drainage of a large glacial lake could have supplied the water, but it is not until the 1940's that he follows this suggestion up with field investigations.

It remains easy to bash Bretz' critics, just as it is easy to bash Barringer's (Meteor Crater AZ) critics, or for that matter, Aristotle who wrote that stones don't fall from the sky, but rather have been picked up by the winds from elsewhere. An argument similar to Aristotle's has been used to "explain" beech tree fossils recovered from Antarctica, and dating less than 3 million years old (IOW, that the fossils were carried there by the wind -- speaking of lazy explanations).

I am quite familiar with the scabland jökulhlaup. I was told that the Nova episode on it was quite good (webpage at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/megaflood/--I haven't looked at it either, but it looks good).

My point is that while extreme views of concepts (e.g., Lyell's) might have held much of the attention, there were plenty who saw it more like we do today.