So is the moral of the story that everybody (or close) that doubts some consensus in physics is a misunderstood genius?
There's also 1000 times more stories of crackpots "knowing" everything, from how to do cold fusion, to perpetual machines, to why Relativity or QM is wrong, etc. They even have the diagrams and math to show you they're right.
And yes, some of them even "knew" things verified later - if you have random unsupported opinions some of those will also be legit.
Unless the parent had some actual proof for their insight before the verification, the phrase "This was always pretty clear to anyone who put some serious thought into it" (as if physicists who didn't regard this didn't) is as good as someone saying the same about a coin toss ("hey, it turned out to be heads, anyone could see that").
No, the story is interesting because it shows the authorities on the subject do get things wrong, and because Townes and many other important scientists knew that the simple idea of instantaneous quantum jumps due to Bohr and Heisenberg and maybe Pauli (I think these three were one the most prominent proponents) wasn't that well secured by the general quantum theory and by the experiments.
The moral is that Bohr just was a guy who lucked into being in the right time and place to contribute to quantum mechanics but that does not make him an otherwise exceptionally insightful into it. Actually, this also is kind of the case with Maxwell. He managed to put together the all-important theory about electromagnetic waves while having in his mind some weird mechanical image of the vacuum that makes one wonder what this guy was actually thinking. And I have to add to this that I consider Maxwell to be a much greater physicist than Bohr. It could well be that being the discoverer of something leads to some kind of intellectual myopia and that further generations are needed to look more sensibly at what was actually discovered.
There's also 1000 times more stories of crackpots "knowing" everything, from how to do cold fusion, to perpetual machines, to why Relativity or QM is wrong, etc. They even have the diagrams and math to show you they're right.
And yes, some of them even "knew" things verified later - if you have random unsupported opinions some of those will also be legit.
Unless the parent had some actual proof for their insight before the verification, the phrase "This was always pretty clear to anyone who put some serious thought into it" (as if physicists who didn't regard this didn't) is as good as someone saying the same about a coin toss ("hey, it turned out to be heads, anyone could see that").