Eric W. Davis, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, noted "The experiment is quite detailed but no theoretical account for momentum violation is given by Tajmar, which will cause peer reviews and technical journal editors to reject his paper should it be submitted to any of the peer-review physics and aerospace journals."[46]
Basically, merely having a lot of replicated experiments isn't a high enough standard--one has to have a theory of why is works. This somewhat makes sense, but kinda fails miserably for things for which we currently have no mechanism for explanation.
Imagine if empiricists were faced with the nonsense of peer-review a couple hundred years ago before they had any of the knowledge of chemistry or physics to really explain electricity. Hell, imagine how Alessandro Volta would have had trouble publishing his work today when all he had was the empirical evidence of a voltaic pile but no knowledge of the electrochemistry that made it work.