"there were a lot of weird ideas (fluids, etc.) about in those days for what electricity was, but that's just because the set of observations was very limited, thus expanding the space of hypotheses beyond what we consider reason these days"

That's pretty much what Kuhn means by pre-paradigm science: when scientists don't know enough about an area to have come up with general principles to guide their research. And Kuhn certainly doesn't think pre-paradigm science is better than science within a paradigm. He's primarily interested in trying to describe how science operates, rather than saying I way of doing science is better than another, but he's pretty clear that most of what scientists accomplish happens when they are working within paradigms.