Backing Off

Brian mentions the problems he has with the conclusions that Kiedaisch and Dinitz. I agree that some of the conclusions are problematic. What I think is more problematic, though, is the backing off from their original claim that generalist tutors are sometimes not enough. Instead of pushing for more research to make their claims more substantial, they claim that the need for non-general tutors is not really that big at all. An anyways, teachers should be doing the work that the non-generalist tutors would be teaching anyways.

When can we just let a claim stand on its own? Why this backing off of something that might be important?