The discovery of the Higss boson and nothing else outside the Standard Model at the LHC is the worst-case scenario: we now have a theory of everything that predicts nothing...
Nobody likes it. It's ugly as hell. Physicists, dreaming of some perfect symmetry driving the universe forwards all recoil in horror. Everybody thinks ot must be possible to make something better.
Problem is, the monster works. After tuning a short list of parameters, it survives everything we can throw at it. We have trouble calculating the consequences, but that's not a failing of the model
The standard model isn’t some single theory that was devised and survived testing. It’s an amalgam of various ideas which have survived experimental verification. It’s a bit hollow IMO to say it “predicts” things. It’s a bit like drawing the dartboard after throwing the darts.
It predicts things as-yet-unseen, also, such as detailed proton structure, precision atomic matrix elements, detailed nuclear structure and decay rates, and so on.
Note that the standard model did NOT predict neutrino mass. Though it did predict that neutrino mass would explain the shortfall of observed neutrinos from the Sun.
* gravity * massive neutrinos * dark matter * dark energy
It is also a highly parameterised model tuned to fit the data.
The biggest concern is whether we can realistically probe the failings of the standard model using a collider at ~TeV scale? If that is the case, then the standard model may be the best model of particle physics we will ever achieve.
But yeah, I agree that the "highly parameterized" part is a statement from fashion, and the number of parameters is really not a good reason to try to replace the Standard Model. (There are many good reasons, but this one isn't one of them.)
Also, I am yet to see any alternative proposal with fewer parameters.
Fine tuning, I agree, is a philosophical issue. I'm a physicist, and I don't buy it. Why does everything have to be perturbatively pleasant? Nobody promised us that.
The issue of artificial parameters is a red herring, I think. Properly computed, of course, well-defined observables are renormalization scale independent. You might have to pick a scheme/scale to do the calculation, but whatever scale dependence remains is an indication of some perturbative truncation. The continuum limit of LQCD, for example, produces real observables with no renormalization scale dependence. Hell, renormalization is not even mysterious in a computational approach.
You missed a bit of detail: Reality, and The Hard Problem of Consciousness.
Granted, this is often not a popular topic of discussion (if not ~taboo), but it's actually rather important imho.
The best thing I've ever come across that illustrates the gap/difference between how materialists think about reality vs (some) "non-materialists" (in this case Tibetan Buddhist Alan Wallace) is this video....seeing the way two highly competent but very different thinkers approach the problem space is enlightening, although it might require some background in both domains to appreciate (so Alan's case doesn't appear as "woo woo").
The Nature of Reality: A Dialogue Between a Buddhist Scholar and a Theoretical Physicist (Sean Carroll)