OK, I can accept that. It doesn't really rule out the possibility of huge masses of low density hydrogen, or low temperature hydrogen stars with something blocking our line of sight, but the former seems very problematic and the latter has the same old verification problems, so good enough.

OK, read it again; he doesn't seem to address MACHOs directly, if at all. The closest he comes seems to be referencing the "the large majority (about 90%) of ordinary matter in a cluster... not in the galaxies themselves, but in hot X-ray emitting intergalactic gas". It's an interesting statement, because he's basically saying that 90% of the matter in the galaxies isn't really "in" them at all, but around them, which, whether we can (normally) see it or not, is exactly what MACHO theories claim; however unlikely the large masses of low density hydrogen I referenced above are, they appear to be real. That doesn't account for the greater gravitational lensing observed beyond the gases in the pictures, but an intervening highly MACHO(s) might.

In other words, and those propositions aren't contradictory because Again, if that's what the evidence and you are saying, fine, but the blog post about the Bullet Cluster does not, in itself, rule out MACHOs; the cluster only rules out MACHOs on the basis that theories about them say they should be homogeneous. Heterogeneous MACHOs could explain the Bullet Cluster, too, but if that's inherently contradictory I don't object to ruling out MACHOs.

What really gives me pause though is statements like the articles first paragraph

Above emphases mine. Does that last sentence sound at all familiar? Maybe like the notion a century ago that all of physics had been mapped out and nothing remained except to fill in the details, the idea so often ridiculed and that "simply doesn't occur as often" now? Is Dr. Carroll one of those oversensationalizing undereducated media hacks you mentioned? If so, should I recognize the sweeping statements with which he leads off his article as authoritative? Or do statements like those and his later one that "We would all love to out-Einstein Einstein" underscore my valid concerns?

Largely covered just now.

That suggestion seems to boil down to MOND or something similar, and as many sources will describe for you, such modified theories do not work well.
Evidently that's Dr. Carrolls conclusion as well; "once you have eliminated MOND, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth". That's rather proscribed thinking, Holmes.

This is a qualitative question, or should be; we're debating whether something exists, not the frequency of its occurrence. If you want to put that in quantitative terms that exotic dark matter is 99% likely, OK, but a lot of your statements (and almost all of Dr. Carrolls) aren't just quantitative, there without qualifiers. If you don't want me objecting that you're being too definitive where too much remains undefined, be less definitive.