Just helping out. 
I pretty much agree with you. This is a lot rarer than most people seem to think. Mocked as a crackpot should mean that this is the predominant view. When there are two sides to a hot scientific debate one side will mock the other. Read Walter Alvarez’s book on the dinosaur extinction debate, for example, but in that case there were two sides and not one lone scientist against the world.
That’s not Russell’s paradox, note. That is basically a self-referential liar’s paradox while Russell’s paradox concerns the set of all sets.
Neither of which have anything to do with the universe. Which makes me think, I do not see an irreconcilable problem with doing (real, not fake!) research in string theory, loop quantum gravity, or what have you even if at first glance one seems to be proving some mathematical theorems that have no obvious connection to currently feasible scientific experiments. Such mathematical frameworks may be useful in their own right as well as down the road in numerical and actual experiments.
So the consensus appears to be “Time Cube guy with better marketing and fundraising potential”. Does that about sum it up?