We haven't completely totally absolutely ruled out more mundane options, and frankly there's been a lot of effort to to come up with those, they just tend to suck balls, if you're under the impression most physicists approach DM with a disposition to hoping its true I'd say that's backwards.



Again, while physics is a field like all others possessing human beings with all their little idiosyncrasies, there is not some cult-like push for WIMPs to be real. We have a lot of mass, or we're 99% certain we do, we've looked for every conceivable 'mundane' source we can find, so we posit some sort of thing which could account for the mass and remain undetected to our previous - and ongoing and increasingly accurate - search methods. Such a particle would, presumably, not interact much and be pretty massive, some sort of 'weakly interacting massive particle' or something like that. Or maybe some mundane object that hangs around on the outskirts where it's hard to see, in the Galactic Halo, and compact too, making it harder to see, some sort of massive, compact, halo object. So we look for the MACHOs, and we don't see them, or rather we do see them, that's the problem, we see them so we know we can see them and we don't see enough of them and there's no reason to think we're not seeing an even spread, so we say "It is very unlikely the Dark Matter is primarily MACHOs, what else is left? Oh, those WIMPs, we haven't ruled those out yet" and so on.



Yeah, great example, it took us decades to find neutrinos because the interact weakly... quarks interact pretty strongly, so strongly we call their interactive force the Strong Force... because we're lazy about naming things. For us to find something, it must interact with something else and do so so that we know it interacted, as you might imagine, this is much easier to do when there are lots of potential interactions and they occur strongly. You know the sort of measures that were needed to find neutrinos, and you get hit by trillions of them a second, these particles are harder to find and are much less common here.



I almost feel like you're objecting because you dislike the words 'dark' or 'exotic'. Their just words, for God's Sake we named two quarks "Strange" and "Charm" because the first strange quark particle had a 'strangely long life' and nobody even knows about charm, and we used to cal the other two truth and beauty but it was a bit too eyerolling even for us. All you're telling me is that you think you might be biased on the subject because you think we are. But the problem is you present nothing indicating we are, and well, this is physics, we don't snap at people for saying they think we might be wrong, that kind of ego and wounded pride aren't really common in the field where profs generally yell at students for not catching their mistakes. I can't refute your 'vibes' either. We call the stuff exotic because we don't know what the stuff is only that it is not normal... of course its probably the most common thing in the universe so I guess whatever it is normal, and we've eliminated a lot of candidates. This is normal scientific procedure, if we're not moving fast enough for you, well I'm sorry, there aren't a lot of physicists and most of us don't study this stuff, we basically have to spread ourselves out to cover ever field of science that hasn't split off into some sub-field, and the kinds of experiments we have to do to find this stuff usually requires nation state levels of money and manpower. Every time we have to come up with a whole new plan and experiment, its like if I told you I had written 'Bob' on a large number of 1 dollar bills, in invisible ink that can only be seen in one small range of light frequencies but which ones I won't tell you, and that I wrote Bob in only 6 sizes and produced and equal quantity of each size, and that I used exactly 1 kilogram of ink, and you had to find them without every touching them yourself, so you decide the best way to do this is is to set up monitors near walmart cash registers looking at different frequencies, hoping the detectors come back with a hit showing an abnormal reflection of light in a given spectrum consistent with the location and general duration of a cash exchange, once you get one, you can make a decent guess what frequency its one and increase the number of detectors for that frequency and their sensitivity, and before you might be able to determine that these 'flash events' occur in six discreet amounts, and from that you may be able to ferret out the average thickness of the ink, then determine how much each additional bill weighs based on the velocity of the moving patch of reflection and how the increased mass changes the drag on the bills as they pass through air. And from that, at last, you can extrapolate the mass of ink used to write each of the six sizes of "Bob" and determine how many bills he wrote on. Of course simultaneously someone may have run a model trying to figure out what percentage of $1 pass through Walmarts and compare it to the number of reflected incidents, and someone else might come by and show that Strip Clubs have an even higher flash event duration and give better if smaller amounts of data, and someone else might come by and show in all probability the ink decays and that not only has much of the 'noise' we thought we saw actually been real events but that our figures have also failed to account for the number of bills that have been soaked in water and no longer flash at all. Not an easy process, finding quarks is like that, finding neutrinos would be like trying to detect those flash events by monitoring the clothing people are wearing when they exit the store to see if they faded more than in a place where more transactions are carried out by electronic means, and if that fading of color indicates flash events took place, and that it only works on wool clothing dyed red, and can only be detected on clothing that has non-red colors as well to compare to. Finding WIMPS is like trying to determine fading from increased clothing sales amongst cash register clerks. I think decades of scientific discovery may have given you a warped viewpoint on how hard this sort of thing actually is.