Pure science, in a perfect world, would be ready and willing to change its beliefs as new information usurped the old ones.

But science is rarely funded outside of government or for-profit labs. So sometimes you get bad science on a big institutional level that, even with the new information, is so entrenched in its contracts and r&d costs it goes ahead with the old paradigm.

Semiprofessional and amateur scientists are, in some ways, at an advantage, as they're less constrained by science-community orthodoxy, and although they cannot afford the same powerful research tools, are less tainted by outer-disciplinary biases.