That's sort of an unnecessary dichotomy. Enthusiasm doesn't mean hoax, and the mistake was propagated by more than just the inventors.

Everything suggests that it was just science in action. There was an experiment, and it failed to reject the null hypothesis of 'no thrust'. A few groups have repeated the experiment, but not to the experimental power needed to thoroughly reject it. This test seems to be a more definitive rejection of it, but we're still not sure why there was any thrust measured in the first place, though there are some pretty reasonable leads on that.