It's not an "improvement", it's an entirely different physical principle.
I don't care if F&P's method was sporadic and elusive.
That's an unintentionally apt description of their method. Their results, however, were nonexistent.
The point is, they brought cold fusion into our conciousness.
Into the public consciousness, for what that's worth. Physicists were aware that it was possible; it had been predicted by Andrei Sakharov in the 1940's.
If they had gone the "peer" route, the invention might have been squashed.
That is so far off base that I can only conclude you have an anti-science axe to grind. A week or two after Pons and Fleischmann hit the pages of People Magazine, Steven Jones of BYU published a peer-reviewed cold fusion technique, using the technique of muon catalysis proposed by Sakharov. The difference is that his technique actually works. There was no attempt to "squash" it. I've never heard one word of reproach for that research.
The fact is that, while we may have looked askance at Pons and Fleischmann's method of announcing their discovery, the physics community overwhelmingly assumed that their claims were honest and that their work was carefully done. We wanted to believe it was true. Many teams rushed to verify their results.
But nature cannot be fooled. It quickly became clear that their results could not be reproduced. They were not forthcoming with details of their work, and when the details did eventually come out, the work turned out to be inexcusably shoddy.
How different are the principles? In both processes, deuterium is dissolved in a medium and then subjected to intense vibrations - one sonic and the other lattice vibrations. The emission of light when ordinary water is subjected ultrasonic vibration seems to suggest that the localized rise in temperature or pressure would be more likely. Of temperature and pressure I would look to pressure as the most likely controlling. The sun may be characterized by high temperatures but the pressures in the sum are enormous as well. As humans we all experience wide variations in temperature and see and feel the effects whereas few humans experience wide variations of pressure, except for scuba diving or a sudden change in the air pressure in an airplane. Thus, the first variable we look for and hang our hats on is temperature.