To your point re: supplementing experimentally backed systems (i.e. Newtonian Mechanics):
"...what is really wanted for a truly Natural Philosophy is a supplement to Newtonian mechanics...and introducing the additional facts, chiefly electrical - especially the fact of variable inertia - discovered since his time..."
"...it may be that when the structure of an electron is understood, we shall see that an 'even-powered' stress in the surrounding aether is necessarily involved. What I do feel instinctively is that this is the direction for discovery, and what is needed is something internal and intrinsic, and that all attempts to explain gravitation as due to the action of some external agency, whether flying particles or impinging waves, are doomed to failure..."
I'm not sure what this quote is meant to illustrate. The structure of the Electron is now understood in QM (it is structure-less, an elementary particle), the luminiferous aether is disproven, and gravity is understood as equivalent to acceleration, essentially through E=mc2, instead of being carried by particle or wave (though it can cause waves, as recently detected). On the other hand, other fields, such as the electrical field, are shown to reduce to particles flying around (photons, for the electric field), so if the quote was meant to say that electrical charge could replace a graviton, that has proven wrong.
"...what is really wanted for a truly Natural Philosophy is a supplement to Newtonian mechanics...and introducing the additional facts, chiefly electrical - especially the fact of variable inertia - discovered since his time..."
"...it may be that when the structure of an electron is understood, we shall see that an 'even-powered' stress in the surrounding aether is necessarily involved. What I do feel instinctively is that this is the direction for discovery, and what is needed is something internal and intrinsic, and that all attempts to explain gravitation as due to the action of some external agency, whether flying particles or impinging waves, are doomed to failure..."
-- Sir Oliver Lodge - Nature, Feb 17, 1921