Alt-space community laughs about some aspects of "traditional aerospace" mentality for about quarter of century if not more. It's mostly about their opinion that rockets somehow are rocket science, pardon the pun.

Given how glacial rocketry progress was by early 2000 it's no wonder people from outside of the industry were pretty annoyed, not to say more. Elon Musk isn't exactly alt-space guy - that would closer describe John Carmack or others - but the effect which he produced on world rocket industry is nevertheless pretty healthy.

It's probably hard to believe that SpaceX is just a correction to a industry which got too swamped with status quo. Somebody - may be SpaceX itself - can actually demonstrate not only reasonable results, but significant innovation.