Mass downvoting of a well referenced pertinent answer: Why is an answer that is a complement to others considered so bad?

Question

I spent many hours writing this answer and many days preparing it.

Is it fair to desk-reject the above paper based solely on this one sentence?

The question primarily asks if it is fair to desk-reject heretical ideas if they run counter to the established knowledge (an antithesis in my opinion; knowledge should always be open to challenge, never established, in my humble opinion).

Others have explained well why it may not be a good idea to desk-reject on the basis of contrarianism alone. I added some historical examples where exactly this stand of not even considering contrarian ideas turned out to be strongly unfair.

It is an attempt at a proof by counterexamples, and intends to complement other answers which are well written and cover all of the important points.

Yet the SE community unkindly engaged in mass downvoting without explaining, and have made the answer invisible.

Why is an answer that is a complement to others considered so bad?

The highest upvoted answer says:

That procedure would remove the ability to overturn incorrect mainstream results.

I only provided supportive examples for this statement.

As a matter of fact, one of my examples (3rd) is mentioned in multiple highly upvoted comments. I wanted to add the complete story, while also adding 2 more examples. How is that so bad?

Answer 1

Your answer seems well-supported (though I haven't gone through the references in detail) and you make a good point: some crazy ideas today may well be accepted science tomorrow.

The question, however, asked something else. The question asked about the right balance between being open to new ideas, and rapidly shutting down "crackpot" papers. And this is precisely the dilemma: if you desk reject papers that make impossible claims, you might reject a great breakthrough. But if you send out every crackpot paper for full peer review, you will quickly have problems. So, OP was asking whether one "rule of thumb" was fair.

I'm guessing the downvotes were because it seems like you didn't appreciate this dilemma. It's as if someone asked: should we give money to charity or save for retirement? and your answer said "there are some amazing charities doing amazing work, such as these three." It might be a correct, well-written answer, but it's not really helpful toward the theoretical OP, who still has to make a difficult decision about helping others vs. saving for their own future.